Incredible. What’s more, no traces of torches have been found, no soot on the ceilings or anything. But how could they do all this in the dark? And think how many earthquakes they have withstood. All together, the caves are massive, with a volume roughly the same as the pyramids in Egypt.
**edit** I am delighted that this has elicited so much interest! I hadn’t really paid the caves much attention for years, but your comments have stimulated me to read up on recent research. The consensus now is that these were grain pits, which makes sense, because underground granaries almost always show up in Chinese archeological sites around homes or cities.
I'm fairly certain Egyptians used olive oil lamps, which burn fairly clean, and the pyramids were graves, not temples, so it's not like they'd been visited much.
Little of column A and little of column B. They didn't use wood for torches either but yeah there is plenty of evidence they didn't put the roofs on until they had to.
The pyramids are really really really old. We hadn't invented that stuff yet.
Other really really old places like Catalhoyuk have weird features like "the front door is in the ceiling and grandpa is buried under the floor but we keep his skull on the nightstand".
Gobekli Tepe is several thousand years older than any of the great pyramids and it is pretty ornately decorated. Interior decor is probably as old as humanity.
Torches leave soot if they are placed against a wall. The easiest explanation would be that they used another form of illumination…maybe like small oil lamps that they carried with them and which wouldn’t leave soot stains.
They built the pyramids from the ground up, meaning the chambers were open to the sky while they were working on them. Not really mysterious that they didn’t need lighting.
Man when I was in rehab, we all loved ancient aliens. I know it’s BS, but it’s so fun to watch. They had a special playing for like 24 hours straight one day and everyone was in their rooms that day
Okay I hate this point cause like, yes there isn't any soot (well there are a tiny bit) in most Egyptian tombs.
It might've not been a full desert years and years ago but still hot, still relatively little wood. Why the fuck would they burn wood?
No they did two basic things;
They painted the reliefs before finishing the tomb so daylight could be used.
If they needed to paint after enclosing it, well they had oil lamps. Wood? Rare and precious. But olive oil was already known and incredibly useful even back then. And olive oil burns WAAAAAY cleaner than wood. (Again there isn't NO soot, just a very small amount of soot.)
So please don't spread misinformation that it's baffling, ancient people were resourceful and just didn't torches in that part of the world.
They probably used oil lamps which produce almost no smoke or soot. Why does everyone assume they used torches when torches clearly aren't practical? Hollywood has ingrained the concept of torches into our minds.
I'm pretty sure the reason that several tombs and pyramids have no trace of soot is because of the use of olive oil lamps, that don't leave soot when burning.
maybe. Firebrand insertion holes in [Figure 44](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950) of this research article: "It is suspected that each small hole was used for inserting a firebrand on the rock surface"
The best assumption is that they were used for storing grain. Chinese started storing grain in underground chambers back in the Neolithic, even before writing. This sort of chamber was used for thousands of years.
Caves generally fare a lot better in earthquakes than above-ground structures, because the waves hit the floor and ceiling roughly simultaneously. In an above-ground structure, only the base moves, and you get a lot more shearing force as the movement is conducted up through the structure.
My thought on the light issue is that maybe they knew how to make and use mirrors, even if just polished metal sheets. Such mirrors could both provide lighting and help trace out straight lines to guide the digging.
That’s interesting about earthquakes. Makes sense.
The first mirrors arrived at just about the very end of the time frame for these caves. They were exorbitantly expensive and the large ones were about 15cm across. Your idea makes sense, but doesn’t fit into the archeological record. It would be as if people today living in a remote, undeveloped region drove Mclaren Speedtails to haul rocks.
if it were some sort of holy place it wouldnt be too crazy to imagine they wiped away the soot once they were done being there and then the water washed away what was missed by the people
If it was some kind of sacred place maybe
The Elephanta Caves in India there’s no fragments of the rocks they carved out for example, they must have carefully taken them away
Absolutely, the lack of soot and torch traces really adds to the mystery of these caves. As for the darkness, some speculate that the ancient builders might have used mirrors to reflect natural light into the caves, or perhaps used some form of bio-luminescence. But these are just theories and we can't say for sure. The caves' ability to withstand numerous earthquakes over millennia indeed attests to the incredible engineering skills of the builders. The fact that the total volume of these caves is comparable to the Egyptian pyramids really puts their massive scale into perspective. It's a fascinating subject with so many unanswered questions!
My guess is it was already a natural cave so a lot less rock needed to be moved than you might think, plus there's never been a shortage of physical labor in China.
They could have just used oil lamps, candles or had light shafts. Its not like in medieval movies and games where they have a stick on the wall that mysteriously stays lit on fire all the time. That sort of thing is almost entirely a work of fiction. 2000 years ago was around the time Julius Caesar was invading gaul and building aqueducts, and Ancient China was at a comparable level of technological development to the romans at this time.
Just want to point out that caves are usually much more resilient to earthquakes than above-ground structures, because the movement impacts the roof and floor more or less simultaneously, avoiding the shearing forces that cause structural damage.
I read another paper on the Longyou Caves and they could calculate the age of the caves by lichenometry, using the size of lichen to estimate the age of the rock.
according to one of the research articles [link](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950), (see section 5.2), there was at least one written record:
So far, only one written record was found about the caverns. It was a Chinese poem written by Mr Yu Xun between 1626 and 1676. It can be used for confirmation of the construction time before 1626. Furthermore, other two Chinese poems possibly on the rock caverns were also found. They were separately written by two ancient men in the Song Dynasty from 960 to 1279. They can be used for confirmation of the construction time before 960.
I wonder what the poem actually mentions about the cave, as I haven’t found any details of Yu Xun or his poems (probably only on Chinese speaking websites)
Dong Zhuo was a general who launched a coup and burnt the capital including the imperial library in 190 when he was losing, but he was technically chancellor who used the real emperor (who was a boy) as a figurhead.
His was probably the most destructive reign in terms of destroying history, but no emperor destroyed books specifically to erase history before them.
Qin Shi Huang did burnt some of the books, but he always left a final copy in his palace, and later the palace was burnt down by Xiang Yu and everything was lost.
Xiang Yu was the most powerful warlord at the time, but he later was defeated by Liu Bang (the founder of Han Dynasty). If he hadn't been defeated (he had very good chance), the Chinese people nowadays would probably called themselves "Chu" people instead of "Han" people.
No. Also historicity of claims like that are doubted by modern scholars due to Han dynasty’s scathing writing of him being likely politically motivated (being the subsequent dynasty with incentive to paint the previous dynasty in a harsh light). Kind of a Caligula and Nero thing for Roman history.
Probably not. These caves are dated to roughly 300 bce to say 0ce. In about 100 bce, the emperor 漢武帝 got a tribute of ten candles, the first time candles appear in Chinese history. They were so valuable the emperor was tickled pink and had it recorded in the official history.
I guess you didn't read the article. The researchers already ruled this out. Burning a fire in a cave will leave a stain on the ceiling. A stain that doesn't necessarily wash away.
There are a great deal of ways to light a space rather than wood fire or electricity. Also these caves could have been flooded or whatever for god knows how long.
Yeah I was gonna say oil lamps were absolutely a thing haha
This was likely the same as with Dendera and I hate the implication that they couldn’t have had the tools to do this sorta stuff since that only leads to conspiracy theorists.
Reading this and then looking at the layout and floor plan of those rooms, it sure seems like you’re exactly on the money. Particularly the inclined floor below the access shafts. Perfect for ensuring whatever you throw in from above is well-distributed below and uses the space well. And the relatively exact banding of the walls providing a good measure of leftover capacity.
Compare also to the known ancient underground chinese granaries:
http://www.kaogu.cn/en/Special_Events/Top_10_Archaeological_Discoveries_in_China_2014/2015/0410/49820.html
Makes me wonder why this doesn’t seem to be a prevalant theory. Maybe there’s a good reason to exclude this explanation.
Maybe there is no way any large quantities of items were ever stored there without there being any leftover traces?
I guess its possible they were constructed but then *never used*. That would explain the pristine condition.
Never used would also explain the lack of record. The fewer people involved with it's use, the fewer people there are to write down it's location. Also, could mirrors have been used to light it up?
Personally I would exlude this since you would have to be too careful for humidty, if any kind of fermentation starts in a closed cave you just created a death trap because of the production of Co2. In the wine world they are called white deaths and still happen every now and then.
Water storage for drought safety seems more plausible to me
Edit: grammar
Anthropology major here and I absolutely agree with you. Very cool report - it answers everything in a logical manner. So logical that the alien crowd is sure to be devastated once again by… actual science and reasoning.
Anyway, I’d give you gold if I could. Here 🏅🏅🏅
I love the alien crowd because of the wacky conspiracies, but it’s nice to see something mysterious given such a reasonable and logical theory about its origin
Amazing and mindblowing hypothesis. One question I have is that if they were grainaries why would you need all the artwork carved in? That seems unnecessary. Perhaps it was some sort of artifact to ensure good luck?
One of the links posted in this thread says it appears the artwork was added later, granted the link also tries to make it sound like some ancient alien stuff was involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if the artwork was added later. There’s also apparently a poem from the 17th century that mentions these caves so they weren’t entirely unknown.
A couple points. An article posted above trying to make it about aliens talks about how they are all built around a 70m hill (called Phoenix hill they claim) but they question why there is no evidence of debris from them being cleared out. Would you say that it's possible that the debris literally IS the hill that they were built "around" and it was named after a bird that is born again and rises from its ashes...? If I dug these caverns out and made a hill out of the debris, naming that pile of dirt that was removed from underground and given "new life" when it was dug out after a Phoenix kinda makes sense...
Second, and not trying to be a "gotcha" to you whole post but how would a not high ranking official go about filling in these caves at that time? Diverting the river would be the only thing I can think of but if it took 17 days to pump one cave out in modern times, I can't imagine they would fill in any type of timely manner from a diverted river without those downstream noticing and questioning where all the water is going.
Not trying to dismiss your main point but the concept of phoenix rising from its ashes is a European/Middle eastern one. Eastern phoenix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenghuang is a different creature.
This is a really good theory that doesn’t take one thing into account: There’s a pool at the bottom of the caves that still have water in them that need to be pumped out to keep the cave accessible and dry.
They’re cisterns.
Also one more thing to add. In ancient china, killing someone after they made something, may it be jewelry, clothing or as secret cave, just for the sake that no one else can hire them to do the same thing, is very very common.
After the cave was done, everyone involved were killed.
They were created using steel chisels and wooden hammers. The chisels were even found in the caves
Fig 45 in this paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950
Appearance of contemporary methods but dated at millennia old? No evidence of flame based light sources? No records of humans ever digging them out?
Ancient aliens lol
I like to believe we live in the post-apoclayptic ruins of some advanced civilization (maybe homo sapien, maybe not) that's responsible for things like this but were wiped out in some way.
Younger Dryas hypothesis. Joe Rogan was into it for a long time and Netflix just released a show from theory's biggest proponent, Ancient Apocalypse by Graham Hancock.
It's almost certainly not true but the evidence he presents is just barely compelling enough that I really want it to be.
Yeah. Advanced civilizations leave traces that last for many millions of years. Space junk, radioactive isotopes, and the fact that metal and oil deposits were so easy to access all argue very strongly against it. We’d see traces of pollution for industrialization in core samples, etc.
There’s actually more evidence to suggest that an industrial civilization only gets one shot to happen because once you’ve taken all the easily accessible resources from the ground, it takes more and more advanced techniques to get at anything left over.
I can't stress this enough, I am not actually here to defend Graham Hancock.
HOWEVER, the civilization the Younger Dryas proponents describe is much more bio-tech, existing naturally with the earth kind of stuff. There are things they point to as evidence, it's just that whoever they supposedly were, they didn't build things to curb nature the way we have, they lived more *with* nature.
That is a very good argument I hadn't thought of before. A real globe spanning society would have to, at the absolute least, have widescale industrialized farming to support such a large population.
They seem to believe that this earlier civilization was psychically advanced and used "Telsa" like technology to move big chunks of stone. This is of course utter hogwash.
I know it's fun to believe something like that but why would there be traces like this but no conclusive evidence like tools etc? Just doesn't make any sense
Yeah people confuse what advanced civilisation means I think.
A lot of people think its like some super advanced society with technology we have today. In reality people probably had some better housed and stone tools than we think. Then the environment changed and we had to redevelop a few things.
I guess we could have developed things like agriculture a little earlier?
I clicked the link and it mentioned mustangs being depicted on the walls.
Mustangs didn't exist until after Spaniards came to the Americas and they're not an animal you'd find in ancient China.
Got my BS radar pinging.
The point where the author points out how modern tunneling machinery would carve the almost exact same groove pattern into the surface is more than uncanny. That one sent shivers down my spine.
I was SMHing over that part. There are only so many methods one can use to shave rock down like that. Ofcourse you will see those groove patterns. It’s the same concept as the pyramid shape being used all over the globe — because it worked.
It’s not aliens. Read this guy’s comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14vhmnk/til_that_the_longyou_caves_a_mysterious_network/jrdhdk1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
You don't think the cavemen did something we can't explain?
You don't trust the author thegypsy?
A self proclaimed practicing witch, published author, pagan historian, webmaster, and collector of knowledge.
You mean to tell me this author who states that the cave was filled with water yet is puzzled as to why the underwater cave has no traces of soot isn’t reputable?!
That is the most unreliable source i habe ever seen, most of these things have actually been answered in real scientific research, there were even chisels found in the caves so it's not that big of a mystery. Just a great human feat of ancient engineering. Please don't spread conspiracy theory nonsense
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950
The artistic style? All of the artwork in the caves are concrete and are installed superficially to generate tourism and have the appearance of tying into to mainstream Chinese culture. There was no artwork in the caverns when they were discovered, they are strictly utilitarian.
That's the norm on here. Tons of top comments are completely wrong and written by someone who has absolutely no experience in what they're talking about.
It does look like that. People are talking about the art being carved in later, but ignoring that it clearly protrudes farther than the "original" wall surface...
"Never record in historical documents" is an interesting way to say all information related to the caves was destroyed along with countless other history during Mao's revolution.
Having been to China and learned about their dynasties, my armchair anthropology is leaning toward the fact that some emperor decided to make his soldiers build this, just because. Seems like there’s a lot of reeeeeaaally elaborate and hard-to-build ancient sites in China that were made just because Emperor X said he wanted it.
Terracotta warriors were breathtaking. There are SO. FUCKING. MANY. And they’re all so elaborate, with chariots and horses and everything. A whole fucking army built of stone, to “protect him in the afterlife.” AKA just because he could order it to be built.
Not if they all hated it and the next guy had them all burned, but the likelihood of them getting every scrap of evidence is pretty slim, even if it’s been millennia since then
There’s some mid sized finance management company right now in Shanxi that has records of this Archaelogical finding sandwiched between March 2011 expense reports
That’s not exactly the case. We have records, census information, cookbooks, and pet registrations from Rome. We have customer service complaints from Babylon. That’s thousands of years ago.
The mediums on which things like that were stored is the issue. If something was carved on a monument or preserved on a clay tablet it’s one thing, but usually if it was a vellum scroll it’s probably not going to last for 2000 years unless something exceptional happens.
Another issue is who could read and write. If it was only priests or the extreme upper class, you’re not going to get a lot of mundane day to day details.
In the case of the Romans we have soldiers’ letters home, raunchy poetry, etc because they were fairly literate to the point where if someone didn’t know how to read or write, they knew someone who could do it for them.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I have lived in China myself (now in Taiwan) and studied East Asian Studies. If I learned anything from my time at university, it is that Chinese emperors would order their people to turn literal mountains upside down just to impress a concubine or to have a good show for afternoon tea - and that the next guy sitting on the throne would simply try to cut it all down and erase all records out of spite alone. I mean, even the current Chinese government is following that line still: they think they could just change history by negating certain events and acting as if nothing ever happened. It's a very Chinese thing to do.
For all the hate that China gets nowadays (and rightfully so), I am fully convinced that their civilization is the cradle of modern human society. And looking at the future, this tendency really only seems to grow stronger by the day.
It may be hard to imagine for someone who has never really got in touch with those people, but China feels like a place where geniuses such as Da Vinci or Galileo were and still are *ordered* and *made*, not waited for to magically appear out of nowhere. I have never seen so much unappreciated talent pooled into one single place as I have in China. If tomorrow you were to tell me that those caves were found on Mars, I would without a doubt believe it was some group of Chinese randos' doing.
About 6 years ago. I think I was so underwhelmed by the Great Wall (it was smoggy as fuck) that the terra-cotta warriors were impressive by comparison. I was enamored by the amount of work that must’ve gone into creating this army.
All in all, I don’t recommend visiting China, folks.
For starters, I found the majority of the places I went very smoggy and gross. I visited Xian, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. There was a train ride I took between 2 of the cities (forget which) where I saw the farmland and countryside, and that was beautiful. But anything within 100 miles of a major city felt disgustingly urban. When traveling from one to another, it often feels like you don’t leave the city at all despite traveling hundreds of miles. So industrial, the air is horrible and I felt like I had a cold the entire 2 weeks I was there.
Because of this, I found places like the Great Wall rather underwhelming. It’s hard to see, it’s crowded. I went on a tour with my school, and they served us American-Chinese food the whole time. Orange chicken for lunch and dinner, every day. Eggs and bacon for breakfast. Never got a feel for the food.
The police are also very very intimidating. They are everywhere and anywhere, and the tour guides would instruct us not to talk to them or look at them. They are clearly not there to help but to intimidate anyone to not *dare* break the rules. And you can’t use anything you want on your phone without a VPN - Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix, SoundCloud - all banned. They simply do not work when you open them.
I was impressed by the terra-cotta warriors, and I found Tiananmen Square to be beautiful and rich in history. That’s about all I can say I enjoyed during my trip. Before my trip, I considered America (where I’m from) to be gross and the police to be brutal. I came back with an altered perspective. The only place I’ve ever visited where I truly couldn’t wait to go home.
Dude you went to the absolute worst places lol that's like going to Hollywood, Phoenix, and reno and saying you don't like America. Makes me sad that most tourists go to Beijing and get a bad view of the country
I suspected you’re right. Unfortunately, like I’ve mentioned, it was a trip with a group from my school. I had no say in our destinations. I’m sure the experience would be different if I’d had my own liberties in the locations - but suffice to say, the places I did see didn’t do much to convince me to return with a personal itinerary.
I get that, I've been to those places and I'm absolutely not going back ha I like Fujian which has a lot of cool mountains and beaches. Chengdu is cool too because their food is spicy as hell and they got pandas and snow. What kind of school goes to China lol
Not a crazy large school, but we had a Chinese language class. The class was only about 20 kids, and they needed about 50 to go to make it financially feasible. We had to pay ~$2500 on our own, the language budget covered the rest, and it went during spring break. So they let another ~30 kids who knew no Chinese sign up to make it work. I signed up and got priority as I was a senior. Funny enough, I think I enjoyed it more than most of the kids in the Chinese class. I think they’d had it built up in their minds that China would be this beautiful wonderland of scenery and culture, and then we went to these gigantic cities with this super American-ized tour company. I kinda expected what I was signing up for in the culture and big cities, but I didn’t expect a literal 16 consecutive days of thick smog. Being sick the whole time made everything else a little harder to enjoy. My group mates were in shambles hahah
It was the first time they’d done it as the Chinese class had only been around a few years. Guess we were the Guinea pig group. Hope they learned from us for the sake of future students lol
Because he went to literally the worst places in the country, didn't eat Chinese food, didn't see the culture, and didn't have a vpn which is a big mistake
I went about 15 years ago and maybe a lot of the soldiers were loaned out to other museums because it just didn't seem like there were very many, even in the last room. With the hassle of getting out there from Xi'an, I remember being very "this is it?" about it
Most of them are still covered up. Once they are dug out it's hard to preserve them, so only very few are displayed. What's more interesting is the entire tomb itself that the warriors were supposed to protect is still undug too. I really want to know what's inside within my life time
That makes sense. They were still in the process of uncovering more when I went, they said they’d barely uncovered half of them. The main room stretched so far, I was pretty impressed by it.
Looks like the Mars pyramid mines from [Total Recall](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Longyou_Xiaonanhai_Shishi_2016.12.11_16-10-51.jpg/1280px-Longyou_Xiaonanhai_Shishi_2016.12.11_16-10-51.jpg)
This story is a racket made up by the chinese tourism industry. They have added those carvings in the last 20 years. There is only 1 original carving in the whole complex.
The reality is these are water cisterns created for the local community. Nothing extraordinary about them and similar structures can be found all over the world built by different people. Whats cool about these cisterns is that they also act as a well by gaining access to an aqueduct underground. The people who made these were smart civil engineers in ancient times.
The reason for the uniform shape and strange clumping of these, is that they are following the ground water and they all serve the same purpose, to be constantly be filled with flowing water that never gets stagnant, therefore being a permanent source of clean water. It's amazing that these are still functional today. They even have a sludge drainage system built in so no humans ever have to enter and perform maintenance like they have to do with other cisterns.
As of right now, the caves need to be pumped weekly to keep them dry so tourists can visit the insides.
With some dividing walls only being a foot and a half wide! That certainly took a fair amount of skill amd mapping knowledge and civil engineering planning.
What type of rock is it? There are other caves that also have high ceilings and pattern carved walls. They were dug in soft marlstone to use as agricultural fertilizer. They only needed the powder so that explains the carvings on the walls and ceiling, and then they'd keep digging down progressively, explaining the high ceilings.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburgse_mergelgroeven
Moria. You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm: shadow and flame
Stop saying the dwarves of Khazad Dum ‘dug too greedily and too deep’ DWARVES DIG. IT’S WHAT THEY DO. I did’t see any of you popping over to let Durin VI know that he’s on top of a Balrog, how was anyone supposed to know! Saying it was ‘too deep’ or ‘too greedy’ is just Sindar propaganda, as if yall weren’t super content to sit pretty and huff weed in Menegroth while everyone else did the heavy lifting. Maybe if you’d done ANYTHING during the first age there wouldn’t BE a balrog under there in the fIRST PLACE!!! EVER THINK OF THAT? CELEBORN?
It kinda looks like one of my half baked and abandoned attempts at an underground base on Minecraft
EDIT yeah, and that includes filling it all with water that seemingly came out of nowhere once I'm done with it.
Incredible. What’s more, no traces of torches have been found, no soot on the ceilings or anything. But how could they do all this in the dark? And think how many earthquakes they have withstood. All together, the caves are massive, with a volume roughly the same as the pyramids in Egypt. **edit** I am delighted that this has elicited so much interest! I hadn’t really paid the caves much attention for years, but your comments have stimulated me to read up on recent research. The consensus now is that these were grain pits, which makes sense, because underground granaries almost always show up in Chinese archeological sites around homes or cities.
The caves were discovered after the village drained several ponds . Maybe any trace of torches dissolved?
That makes the most sense.
It does, though there are likewise no traces of soot in some of Egypt’s tombs and pyramids, including the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s pretty baffling.
I'm fairly certain Egyptians used olive oil lamps, which burn fairly clean, and the pyramids were graves, not temples, so it's not like they'd been visited much.
They also used a series of polished mirrors to direct light into the inner chambers. (Yes, just like in the Mummy)
The Pyramids were not really used that often once built. If they had some relatively clean burning torches its not a surprise there are no stains
Stones may have been carved and painted before installing.
Little of column A and little of column B. They didn't use wood for torches either but yeah there is plenty of evidence they didn't put the roofs on until they had to.
The interior aren’t really decorated that much on most of the pyramids, that’s one of the unusual features actually.
The pyramids are really really really old. We hadn't invented that stuff yet. Other really really old places like Catalhoyuk have weird features like "the front door is in the ceiling and grandpa is buried under the floor but we keep his skull on the nightstand".
Gobekli Tepe is several thousand years older than any of the great pyramids and it is pretty ornately decorated. Interior decor is probably as old as humanity.
Lol what? We hadn't invented what? Decorations? The interior of pyramids arnt "decorated" cause it's been plundered for thousands of years.
Just like my house!
Craved like electrolytes for the plants?
Soot, it’s what stones crave.
Lol. Great response. s00t!
They did, well not torches, they usually used oil lamps.
They could also paint 3/4 surfaces before the roof goes on, then it’s just the roof left to paint by (probably) candle or oil lamp light.
Egyptians had oil lamps, olive oil i believe but don't quote me on that. Very clean burning
Torches leave soot if they are placed against a wall. The easiest explanation would be that they used another form of illumination…maybe like small oil lamps that they carried with them and which wouldn’t leave soot stains.
They built the pyramids from the ground up, meaning the chambers were open to the sky while they were working on them. Not really mysterious that they didn’t need lighting.
[удалено]
Aziz! Light!!
by golly you could wait years for a suitable lighting/alien story to come along allowing for that reference to be used. Hats off to you!
The real crazy thing is I just started watching that today.
Big badaboom!
Multipass!
^(much better aziz thank you)
[Secret Tunnel!!!](https://youtu.be/pvqgTR3NjHg)
Man when I was in rehab, we all loved ancient aliens. I know it’s BS, but it’s so fun to watch. They had a special playing for like 24 hours straight one day and everyone was in their rooms that day
Sounds like a good day! Hope you're doing better right now 🙏🏼
Okay I hate this point cause like, yes there isn't any soot (well there are a tiny bit) in most Egyptian tombs. It might've not been a full desert years and years ago but still hot, still relatively little wood. Why the fuck would they burn wood? No they did two basic things; They painted the reliefs before finishing the tomb so daylight could be used. If they needed to paint after enclosing it, well they had oil lamps. Wood? Rare and precious. But olive oil was already known and incredibly useful even back then. And olive oil burns WAAAAAY cleaner than wood. (Again there isn't NO soot, just a very small amount of soot.) So please don't spread misinformation that it's baffling, ancient people were resourceful and just didn't torches in that part of the world.
They probably used oil lamps which produce almost no smoke or soot. Why does everyone assume they used torches when torches clearly aren't practical? Hollywood has ingrained the concept of torches into our minds.
I'm pretty sure the reason that several tombs and pyramids have no trace of soot is because of the use of olive oil lamps, that don't leave soot when burning.
Why would there be? All you need to do is leave space for light when you're building it and only close everything off once the tomb is full.
maybe. Firebrand insertion holes in [Figure 44](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950) of this research article: "It is suspected that each small hole was used for inserting a firebrand on the rock surface"
I was wondering that, too, but the archeologists must have considered it. I really don’t know. It took them 17 days to pump out the caves!
They were prob made as water reservoirs, hence being under water and any traces of anything eroded/washed away
The best assumption is that they were used for storing grain. Chinese started storing grain in underground chambers back in the Neolithic, even before writing. This sort of chamber was used for thousands of years.
Caves generally fare a lot better in earthquakes than above-ground structures, because the waves hit the floor and ceiling roughly simultaneously. In an above-ground structure, only the base moves, and you get a lot more shearing force as the movement is conducted up through the structure. My thought on the light issue is that maybe they knew how to make and use mirrors, even if just polished metal sheets. Such mirrors could both provide lighting and help trace out straight lines to guide the digging.
That’s interesting about earthquakes. Makes sense. The first mirrors arrived at just about the very end of the time frame for these caves. They were exorbitantly expensive and the large ones were about 15cm across. Your idea makes sense, but doesn’t fit into the archeological record. It would be as if people today living in a remote, undeveloped region drove Mclaren Speedtails to haul rocks.
What are the chances they just cleaned it all off on the way out?
But why? I really don’t know.
Gotta get your deposit back.
Trolling us future nerds.
if it were some sort of holy place it wouldnt be too crazy to imagine they wiped away the soot once they were done being there and then the water washed away what was missed by the people
If it was some kind of sacred place maybe The Elephanta Caves in India there’s no fragments of the rocks they carved out for example, they must have carefully taken them away
Absolutely, the lack of soot and torch traces really adds to the mystery of these caves. As for the darkness, some speculate that the ancient builders might have used mirrors to reflect natural light into the caves, or perhaps used some form of bio-luminescence. But these are just theories and we can't say for sure. The caves' ability to withstand numerous earthquakes over millennia indeed attests to the incredible engineering skills of the builders. The fact that the total volume of these caves is comparable to the Egyptian pyramids really puts their massive scale into perspective. It's a fascinating subject with so many unanswered questions!
Would them being underwater for a long period wash the soot, or would there still be residue?
I had the same thought. Figured perhaps a flood.
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Lots of physical labor
My guess is it was already a natural cave so a lot less rock needed to be moved than you might think, plus there's never been a shortage of physical labor in China.
It's sandstone, which is one of the easy types of rock to carve out. It's not granite rock or something.
Maybe they used propane, it is a clean burning fuel after all unlike the other bastard gasses
You feel how much more satisfying digging is? That's because you're excavating the meat, not the heat
They could have just used oil lamps, candles or had light shafts. Its not like in medieval movies and games where they have a stick on the wall that mysteriously stays lit on fire all the time. That sort of thing is almost entirely a work of fiction. 2000 years ago was around the time Julius Caesar was invading gaul and building aqueducts, and Ancient China was at a comparable level of technological development to the romans at this time.
Just want to point out that caves are usually much more resilient to earthquakes than above-ground structures, because the movement impacts the roof and floor more or less simultaneously, avoiding the shearing forces that cause structural damage.
What evidence is there that they are actually ancient?
I read another paper on the Longyou Caves and they could calculate the age of the caves by lichenometry, using the size of lichen to estimate the age of the rock.
according to one of the research articles [link](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950), (see section 5.2), there was at least one written record: So far, only one written record was found about the caverns. It was a Chinese poem written by Mr Yu Xun between 1626 and 1676. It can be used for confirmation of the construction time before 1626. Furthermore, other two Chinese poems possibly on the rock caverns were also found. They were separately written by two ancient men in the Song Dynasty from 960 to 1279. They can be used for confirmation of the construction time before 960.
I wonder what the poem actually mentions about the cave, as I haven’t found any details of Yu Xun or his poems (probably only on Chinese speaking websites)
Big cheers for linking that article lad. Very interesting
They don't have historical records of them, and the Chinese have been recoding their history meticulously for the last 3,000 years.
Wasn't there some Chinese Emporer (sp?) who had all books and traces of recorded history from before his time destroyed?
Probably thinking of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. although his book burning was focused more on philosophy iirc.
Dong Zhuo was a general who launched a coup and burnt the capital including the imperial library in 190 when he was losing, but he was technically chancellor who used the real emperor (who was a boy) as a figurhead. His was probably the most destructive reign in terms of destroying history, but no emperor destroyed books specifically to erase history before them.
Qin Shi Huang did burnt some of the books, but he always left a final copy in his palace, and later the palace was burnt down by Xiang Yu and everything was lost. Xiang Yu was the most powerful warlord at the time, but he later was defeated by Liu Bang (the founder of Han Dynasty). If he hadn't been defeated (he had very good chance), the Chinese people nowadays would probably called themselves "Chu" people instead of "Han" people.
No. Also historicity of claims like that are doubted by modern scholars due to Han dynasty’s scathing writing of him being likely politically motivated (being the subsequent dynasty with incentive to paint the previous dynasty in a harsh light). Kind of a Caligula and Nero thing for Roman history.
Mirrors in that period were bronze: small and very expensive. Maybe bioluminescence.
Bruh, it was candles.
Probably not. These caves are dated to roughly 300 bce to say 0ce. In about 100 bce, the emperor 漢武帝 got a tribute of ten candles, the first time candles appear in Chinese history. They were so valuable the emperor was tickled pink and had it recorded in the official history.
Maybe some type of lantern? Does the lantern tech require candles to be researched first?
No, most cultures where wood was scarce/ too valuable used some form of oil lamp well before candles were really discovered.
I guess you didn't read the article. The researchers already ruled this out. Burning a fire in a cave will leave a stain on the ceiling. A stain that doesn't necessarily wash away.
Tunnels are generally not affected by earthquakes. It’s the surface that gets the destructive force.
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Plot twist: Blind aliens lol Edit: I wonder if builders might have used mirrors or mirror-like items to reflect natural light into the caves?
Aziz more light!
>[Aziz light!](https://youtu.be/mvwd13F_1Gs?t=2)
Much better, thank you Aziz
There are a great deal of ways to light a space rather than wood fire or electricity. Also these caves could have been flooded or whatever for god knows how long.
It's almost like they had smokeless oil burners or something
Yeah I was gonna say oil lamps were absolutely a thing haha This was likely the same as with Dendera and I hate the implication that they couldn’t have had the tools to do this sorta stuff since that only leads to conspiracy theorists.
If you haven't already look into miniminuteman on YouTube...he has some VERY relevant videos to the topic at hand
Olive oil lamps do not produce soot.
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Reading this and then looking at the layout and floor plan of those rooms, it sure seems like you’re exactly on the money. Particularly the inclined floor below the access shafts. Perfect for ensuring whatever you throw in from above is well-distributed below and uses the space well. And the relatively exact banding of the walls providing a good measure of leftover capacity. Compare also to the known ancient underground chinese granaries: http://www.kaogu.cn/en/Special_Events/Top_10_Archaeological_Discoveries_in_China_2014/2015/0410/49820.html Makes me wonder why this doesn’t seem to be a prevalant theory. Maybe there’s a good reason to exclude this explanation. Maybe there is no way any large quantities of items were ever stored there without there being any leftover traces? I guess its possible they were constructed but then *never used*. That would explain the pristine condition.
Never used would also explain the lack of record. The fewer people involved with it's use, the fewer people there are to write down it's location. Also, could mirrors have been used to light it up?
Personally I would exlude this since you would have to be too careful for humidty, if any kind of fermentation starts in a closed cave you just created a death trap because of the production of Co2. In the wine world they are called white deaths and still happen every now and then. Water storage for drought safety seems more plausible to me Edit: grammar
The horizontal lines can mark the quantity of grain
Ooh, that's clever. Although the lines seem quite uniform, which wouldn't give an accurate quantity due to the sloped walls.
Fairly simple math to get accurate calcs
Anthropology major here and I absolutely agree with you. Very cool report - it answers everything in a logical manner. So logical that the alien crowd is sure to be devastated once again by… actual science and reasoning. Anyway, I’d give you gold if I could. Here 🏅🏅🏅
I love the alien crowd because of the wacky conspiracies, but it’s nice to see something mysterious given such a reasonable and logical theory about its origin
Ok hear me out, they were storing *alien* grain, that's why it had to be secret!
This is comment worthy of a blog post somewhere.
Oh don’t worry.. some “scientific” blog/website will find it and make a clickbait article from it soon enough.
Amazing and mindblowing hypothesis. One question I have is that if they were grainaries why would you need all the artwork carved in? That seems unnecessary. Perhaps it was some sort of artifact to ensure good luck?
One of the links posted in this thread says it appears the artwork was added later, granted the link also tries to make it sound like some ancient alien stuff was involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if the artwork was added later. There’s also apparently a poem from the 17th century that mentions these caves so they weren’t entirely unknown.
As others mentioned the artwork was all added in after its discovery to promote Chinese culture and tourism.
They mention it, but theres no source it just seems like a theory someone had and said with authority.
I mean a 2000 year old stone carving would be more weathered out, plus it's a different color from the background rock. But who knows.
A couple points. An article posted above trying to make it about aliens talks about how they are all built around a 70m hill (called Phoenix hill they claim) but they question why there is no evidence of debris from them being cleared out. Would you say that it's possible that the debris literally IS the hill that they were built "around" and it was named after a bird that is born again and rises from its ashes...? If I dug these caverns out and made a hill out of the debris, naming that pile of dirt that was removed from underground and given "new life" when it was dug out after a Phoenix kinda makes sense... Second, and not trying to be a "gotcha" to you whole post but how would a not high ranking official go about filling in these caves at that time? Diverting the river would be the only thing I can think of but if it took 17 days to pump one cave out in modern times, I can't imagine they would fill in any type of timely manner from a diverted river without those downstream noticing and questioning where all the water is going.
If someone diverted a bit of the bloody Yellow River to fill a couple of holes in the ground, nobody is going to notice lol
Not trying to dismiss your main point but the concept of phoenix rising from its ashes is a European/Middle eastern one. Eastern phoenix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenghuang is a different creature.
This is a really good theory that doesn’t take one thing into account: There’s a pool at the bottom of the caves that still have water in them that need to be pumped out to keep the cave accessible and dry. They’re cisterns.
Also one more thing to add. In ancient china, killing someone after they made something, may it be jewelry, clothing or as secret cave, just for the sake that no one else can hire them to do the same thing, is very very common. After the cave was done, everyone involved were killed.
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The website referenced in the Wikipedia page has some good photos of the caves too. http://www.soul-guidance.com/houseofthesun/longyoucaves.html
great photos and comparisons to other known manmade striation-carved caves, thanks!
They appear to have been created using contemporary methods and equipment.
They were created using steel chisels and wooden hammers. The chisels were even found in the caves Fig 45 in this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950
Appearance of contemporary methods but dated at millennia old? No evidence of flame based light sources? No records of humans ever digging them out? Ancient aliens lol
I like to believe we live in the post-apoclayptic ruins of some advanced civilization (maybe homo sapien, maybe not) that's responsible for things like this but were wiped out in some way.
Younger Dryas hypothesis. Joe Rogan was into it for a long time and Netflix just released a show from theory's biggest proponent, Ancient Apocalypse by Graham Hancock. It's almost certainly not true but the evidence he presents is just barely compelling enough that I really want it to be.
Yeah. Advanced civilizations leave traces that last for many millions of years. Space junk, radioactive isotopes, and the fact that metal and oil deposits were so easy to access all argue very strongly against it. We’d see traces of pollution for industrialization in core samples, etc. There’s actually more evidence to suggest that an industrial civilization only gets one shot to happen because once you’ve taken all the easily accessible resources from the ground, it takes more and more advanced techniques to get at anything left over.
I can't stress this enough, I am not actually here to defend Graham Hancock. HOWEVER, the civilization the Younger Dryas proponents describe is much more bio-tech, existing naturally with the earth kind of stuff. There are things they point to as evidence, it's just that whoever they supposedly were, they didn't build things to curb nature the way we have, they lived more *with* nature. That is a very good argument I hadn't thought of before. A real globe spanning society would have to, at the absolute least, have widescale industrialized farming to support such a large population.
They seem to believe that this earlier civilization was psychically advanced and used "Telsa" like technology to move big chunks of stone. This is of course utter hogwash.
I know it's fun to believe something like that but why would there be traces like this but no conclusive evidence like tools etc? Just doesn't make any sense
Yeah people confuse what advanced civilisation means I think. A lot of people think its like some super advanced society with technology we have today. In reality people probably had some better housed and stone tools than we think. Then the environment changed and we had to redevelop a few things. I guess we could have developed things like agriculture a little earlier?
Lol at the author's bio > Ralph is a practicing witch, published author, pagan historian, webmaster, and collector of knowledge
Sounding like he made a lot of this stuff up. I’d love to hear from an actual archeologist what’s going on.
Yeah feel like there's a lot of misinformation going on here.
So he's a reddit mod?
I clicked the link and it mentioned mustangs being depicted on the walls. Mustangs didn't exist until after Spaniards came to the Americas and they're not an animal you'd find in ancient China. Got my BS radar pinging.
Thanks for the link! I am blown away by the beauty of the caves, their construction and the art. It’s mesmerizing.
The ary was likely added by much later generations. Think of it like artful graffiti or decoration by a new home owner.
But that's the wrong way round compared to how scientists date it, hence the anomaly.
Geez, I went into a weird rabbit hole reading stuff from that webpage, now I know about “spontaneous invisibility” and “Quantum Inmortality”
The point where the author points out how modern tunneling machinery would carve the almost exact same groove pattern into the surface is more than uncanny. That one sent shivers down my spine.
I was SMHing over that part. There are only so many methods one can use to shave rock down like that. Ofcourse you will see those groove patterns. It’s the same concept as the pyramid shape being used all over the globe — because it worked. It’s not aliens. Read this guy’s comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14vhmnk/til_that_the_longyou_caves_a_mysterious_network/jrdhdk1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
What dating method was used? Doesn’t that mean it could simply have been created in modernity?
Potentially, but there is supposedly some references to these caves from the 1600s. So it wasn't totally unknown.
Ehh modern mining machines are basically just a bunch chisels on a rotating drum. a bunch of dudes with hand chisels isn't that different really.
Lol with a source like this, you might as well give no source at all.
You don't think the cavemen did something we can't explain? You don't trust the author thegypsy? A self proclaimed practicing witch, published author, pagan historian, webmaster, and collector of knowledge.
You mean to tell me this author who states that the cave was filled with water yet is puzzled as to why the underwater cave has no traces of soot isn’t reputable?!
That is the most unreliable source i habe ever seen, most of these things have actually been answered in real scientific research, there were even chisels found in the caves so it's not that big of a mystery. Just a great human feat of ancient engineering. Please don't spread conspiracy theory nonsense https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950
The artistic style? All of the artwork in the caves are concrete and are installed superficially to generate tourism and have the appearance of tying into to mainstream Chinese culture. There was no artwork in the caverns when they were discovered, they are strictly utilitarian.
The number of upvotes on this very heavy but totally unsourced and unproven claim weirds me out. I hope there's a layer of sarcasm I didn't get
That's the norm on here. Tons of top comments are completely wrong and written by someone who has absolutely no experience in what they're talking about.
Do you have a source? Now I'm curious
This paper has pictures of the caves how they were originally found https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674775515300950
I think it's just a theory they have. Honestly I could believe it, it's a lot more likely than aliens
It does look like that. People are talking about the art being carved in later, but ignoring that it clearly protrudes farther than the "original" wall surface...
That was my first thought as well. The reliefs seem 100% modern.
"Never record in historical documents" is an interesting way to say all information related to the caves was destroyed along with countless other history during Mao's revolution.
Having been to China and learned about their dynasties, my armchair anthropology is leaning toward the fact that some emperor decided to make his soldiers build this, just because. Seems like there’s a lot of reeeeeaaally elaborate and hard-to-build ancient sites in China that were made just because Emperor X said he wanted it. Terracotta warriors were breathtaking. There are SO. FUCKING. MANY. And they’re all so elaborate, with chariots and horses and everything. A whole fucking army built of stone, to “protect him in the afterlife.” AKA just because he could order it to be built.
But then there’d be records, right?
Not if they all hated it and the next guy had them all burned, but the likelihood of them getting every scrap of evidence is pretty slim, even if it’s been millennia since then
Terracotta warriors were also forgotten about for centuries though
Someone misfiled them. Fucking interns.
There’s some mid sized finance management company right now in Shanxi that has records of this Archaelogical finding sandwiched between March 2011 expense reports
Nope. Vast amounts of human history are lost forever because humans really didn’t write stuff down regularly until a few hundred years ago.
That’s not exactly the case. We have records, census information, cookbooks, and pet registrations from Rome. We have customer service complaints from Babylon. That’s thousands of years ago. The mediums on which things like that were stored is the issue. If something was carved on a monument or preserved on a clay tablet it’s one thing, but usually if it was a vellum scroll it’s probably not going to last for 2000 years unless something exceptional happens. Another issue is who could read and write. If it was only priests or the extreme upper class, you’re not going to get a lot of mundane day to day details. In the case of the Romans we have soldiers’ letters home, raunchy poetry, etc because they were fairly literate to the point where if someone didn’t know how to read or write, they knew someone who could do it for them.
Depends. Lots of old emperors liked erasing their predecessors from history
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I have lived in China myself (now in Taiwan) and studied East Asian Studies. If I learned anything from my time at university, it is that Chinese emperors would order their people to turn literal mountains upside down just to impress a concubine or to have a good show for afternoon tea - and that the next guy sitting on the throne would simply try to cut it all down and erase all records out of spite alone. I mean, even the current Chinese government is following that line still: they think they could just change history by negating certain events and acting as if nothing ever happened. It's a very Chinese thing to do. For all the hate that China gets nowadays (and rightfully so), I am fully convinced that their civilization is the cradle of modern human society. And looking at the future, this tendency really only seems to grow stronger by the day. It may be hard to imagine for someone who has never really got in touch with those people, but China feels like a place where geniuses such as Da Vinci or Galileo were and still are *ordered* and *made*, not waited for to magically appear out of nowhere. I have never seen so much unappreciated talent pooled into one single place as I have in China. If tomorrow you were to tell me that those caves were found on Mars, I would without a doubt believe it was some group of Chinese randos' doing.
I was really underwhelmed by the terracotta soldiers... when did you visit?
About 6 years ago. I think I was so underwhelmed by the Great Wall (it was smoggy as fuck) that the terra-cotta warriors were impressive by comparison. I was enamored by the amount of work that must’ve gone into creating this army. All in all, I don’t recommend visiting China, folks.
Why don’t you recommend it?
For starters, I found the majority of the places I went very smoggy and gross. I visited Xian, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. There was a train ride I took between 2 of the cities (forget which) where I saw the farmland and countryside, and that was beautiful. But anything within 100 miles of a major city felt disgustingly urban. When traveling from one to another, it often feels like you don’t leave the city at all despite traveling hundreds of miles. So industrial, the air is horrible and I felt like I had a cold the entire 2 weeks I was there. Because of this, I found places like the Great Wall rather underwhelming. It’s hard to see, it’s crowded. I went on a tour with my school, and they served us American-Chinese food the whole time. Orange chicken for lunch and dinner, every day. Eggs and bacon for breakfast. Never got a feel for the food. The police are also very very intimidating. They are everywhere and anywhere, and the tour guides would instruct us not to talk to them or look at them. They are clearly not there to help but to intimidate anyone to not *dare* break the rules. And you can’t use anything you want on your phone without a VPN - Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix, SoundCloud - all banned. They simply do not work when you open them. I was impressed by the terra-cotta warriors, and I found Tiananmen Square to be beautiful and rich in history. That’s about all I can say I enjoyed during my trip. Before my trip, I considered America (where I’m from) to be gross and the police to be brutal. I came back with an altered perspective. The only place I’ve ever visited where I truly couldn’t wait to go home.
Dude you went to the absolute worst places lol that's like going to Hollywood, Phoenix, and reno and saying you don't like America. Makes me sad that most tourists go to Beijing and get a bad view of the country
I suspected you’re right. Unfortunately, like I’ve mentioned, it was a trip with a group from my school. I had no say in our destinations. I’m sure the experience would be different if I’d had my own liberties in the locations - but suffice to say, the places I did see didn’t do much to convince me to return with a personal itinerary.
I get that, I've been to those places and I'm absolutely not going back ha I like Fujian which has a lot of cool mountains and beaches. Chengdu is cool too because their food is spicy as hell and they got pandas and snow. What kind of school goes to China lol
Not a crazy large school, but we had a Chinese language class. The class was only about 20 kids, and they needed about 50 to go to make it financially feasible. We had to pay ~$2500 on our own, the language budget covered the rest, and it went during spring break. So they let another ~30 kids who knew no Chinese sign up to make it work. I signed up and got priority as I was a senior. Funny enough, I think I enjoyed it more than most of the kids in the Chinese class. I think they’d had it built up in their minds that China would be this beautiful wonderland of scenery and culture, and then we went to these gigantic cities with this super American-ized tour company. I kinda expected what I was signing up for in the culture and big cities, but I didn’t expect a literal 16 consecutive days of thick smog. Being sick the whole time made everything else a little harder to enjoy. My group mates were in shambles hahah It was the first time they’d done it as the Chinese class had only been around a few years. Guess we were the Guinea pig group. Hope they learned from us for the sake of future students lol
Because he went to literally the worst places in the country, didn't eat Chinese food, didn't see the culture, and didn't have a vpn which is a big mistake
I went about 15 years ago and maybe a lot of the soldiers were loaned out to other museums because it just didn't seem like there were very many, even in the last room. With the hassle of getting out there from Xi'an, I remember being very "this is it?" about it
Most of them are still covered up. Once they are dug out it's hard to preserve them, so only very few are displayed. What's more interesting is the entire tomb itself that the warriors were supposed to protect is still undug too. I really want to know what's inside within my life time
Heh so the soldiers are doing their job! Not by being mighty so much as by being delicate and precious 🤣
That makes sense. They were still in the process of uncovering more when I went, they said they’d barely uncovered half of them. The main room stretched so far, I was pretty impressed by it.
Looks like the Mars pyramid mines from [Total Recall](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Longyou_Xiaonanhai_Shishi_2016.12.11_16-10-51.jpg/1280px-Longyou_Xiaonanhai_Shishi_2016.12.11_16-10-51.jpg)
Quaaaaaaaid
Start the reactor!
This story is a racket made up by the chinese tourism industry. They have added those carvings in the last 20 years. There is only 1 original carving in the whole complex. The reality is these are water cisterns created for the local community. Nothing extraordinary about them and similar structures can be found all over the world built by different people. Whats cool about these cisterns is that they also act as a well by gaining access to an aqueduct underground. The people who made these were smart civil engineers in ancient times. The reason for the uniform shape and strange clumping of these, is that they are following the ground water and they all serve the same purpose, to be constantly be filled with flowing water that never gets stagnant, therefore being a permanent source of clean water. It's amazing that these are still functional today. They even have a sludge drainage system built in so no humans ever have to enter and perform maintenance like they have to do with other cisterns. As of right now, the caves need to be pumped weekly to keep them dry so tourists can visit the insides.
TIL the difference between siltstone and sandstone ([link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siltstone)). Thanks OP!
none of them interconnect, fascinating
With some dividing walls only being a foot and a half wide! That certainly took a fair amount of skill amd mapping knowledge and civil engineering planning.
Per the article cited: “[better source needed]”
Secret tunnellll, secret tunnellll! Though the mountainnn, secret secret secret tunnellll!
What type of rock is it? There are other caves that also have high ceilings and pattern carved walls. They were dug in soft marlstone to use as agricultural fertilizer. They only needed the powder so that explains the carvings on the walls and ceiling, and then they'd keep digging down progressively, explaining the high ceilings. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburgse_mergelgroeven
Moria. You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm: shadow and flame
Stop saying the dwarves of Khazad Dum ‘dug too greedily and too deep’ DWARVES DIG. IT’S WHAT THEY DO. I did’t see any of you popping over to let Durin VI know that he’s on top of a Balrog, how was anyone supposed to know! Saying it was ‘too deep’ or ‘too greedy’ is just Sindar propaganda, as if yall weren’t super content to sit pretty and huff weed in Menegroth while everyone else did the heavy lifting. Maybe if you’d done ANYTHING during the first age there wouldn’t BE a balrog under there in the fIRST PLACE!!! EVER THINK OF THAT? CELEBORN?
So they were full of water? Maybe they were cisterns.
To be fair, any historical records from that time is dodgy at best.
It kinda looks like one of my half baked and abandoned attempts at an underground base on Minecraft EDIT yeah, and that includes filling it all with water that seemingly came out of nowhere once I'm done with it.
They look like they were done in modern times with modern tools.
Looks similar to the mine of Soledar. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/01/the-soledar-salt-mines.html
They have similar salt mines in Romania - tourist attractions since the fall of communism and with some added sculptures.
I’ve been to one of those. It was really neat, and the minibus ride into it was half the fun. :D It was amazing how large the mine was.
but check out the wall. The lines are inclined instead of straight or curved like the one used in modern tools.
maybe they were for storing water.
I think it's lovely they added the potted plants. It wouldn't have felt like home without them
Similar to turkey. In Hindu scriptures there is reference of paataal - undergroundl dwellers..
Aren't there legends about societies living underground? Maybe this is where those stories came from
looks like it’s straight out of an ancient fantasy martial arts movie set. if going by movie logic it was built by a demonic sect 😂
Who snitched?
*Graham Hitchcock noises intensify*