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Unsolved mystery - I have grasped the stake... I take the measuring cord in the company of Seshat. I consider the progressive movements of the stars. My eye is fixed upon the Bull's Thigh [Ursa Major]. I count off time ..... and establish the corners of the Temple.

The above text is an inscription from the Temple of Horus at Edfu accompanying the relief showing "Stretching the Cord" Ceremony.

The Pharaoh and the Goddess Seshat, planting stakes linked by
a looped rope, participate in the 'Stretching the Cord' ceremony.

A Great Circle drawn through the celestial poles divides the sky, marking out a point on the celestial equator from which measurement can begin. This is what is meant by 'Stretching the Cord', creating the first path across the trackless waste.

The Mayan celebration of the establishment of creation is a description of the process of surveying the world:
'Great is the recital, the history of the time when all the corners of the sky and earth were completed, and the quadrangulation, its measure, the four points, the measuring of the corners, the measuring of the lines, in heaven, in earth, at the four corners'  (From the Mayan text of The Popul Vuh)
A more recent translation makes this even clearer; 'The fourfold siding, fourfold cornering, measuring, fourfold staking, halving the cord, stretching the cord in the sky, on the earth, / the four sides, the four corners as it is said '

The pillars which support the sky are to be regarded as benchmarks, boundary stones put down to enable an order to be imposed upon chaos, and a measure to be made of the earth. However, it should be apparent after all this discussion of the 'corners of the earth', that it is not the earth we walk about on that is of concern here. This particular 'earth' is not only square but flat. Exactly what this means will soon become clear. We should recall that it is the matter of Time that is being measured in this surveying process. This is the process that the prophet Enoch describes when, during his vision he asks his guide to explain the actions of the angels they see:

'Wherefore have they taken those long ropes and gone forth? He said 'They are gone forth to measure. These measures shall reveal all the secrets of the depths of the earth' (Book of Enoch ch. LX v. 2-6)

The process these Angels were going forth to conduct must have been similar to that ceremony which in Egypt was known as 'stretching the rope' and which accompanied the commencement of any building project, thus relating its construction to the original founding of the earth.

In the Old Testament Book of Job, God challenges Job to answer:

'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? ..Who decided the dimensions of it... or who stretched the measuring line across it? What supports its pillars at their bases? (Jerusalem Bible tr.)'

This process of surveying the foundations of creation reappears in the verses of the Rig Veda which tell how Varuna made fast the earth and heaven, and here we are told specifically that he did so by using the sun as a measure, and as a commentary on these verses points out, 'we must take this measure as a measuring line'.
As if to emphasise the importance of this role of surveying, the Chinese deities responsible for creation come equipped with compass and plumbline.

What all this means is that the 'bindings' which hold heaven and earth together are to be taken also as plumblines which stretch out the measures of creation across the circle of the stars. It is a particular state of order that is being held fast.

Representations of the cosmos constructed in this way appear again and again, often in unlikely places.
An elemental one is the rectilinear cross which appears on the English flag ( the Royal Orb is a more complete image, including as it does the spherical universe bounded by the cross). Another more detailed example from China comes in the form of a series of mirrors known as the TVL mirrors, because of their decorative patterns, described as follows:

'The four T's that stand around the square earth are the four cardinal points. These lie at the extremities of the two cosmic lines or ropes which cross the universe and hold it together; the T's comprise a vertical prop which supports a horizontal beam; the four V's mark the four corners of heaven. The four L's represent devices used by carpenters to set a straight line...thus they symbolize the ends of the two cosmic lines as if they had been drawn with the help of such an instrument.'
[Related link:  http://www2.uiuc.edu/unit/ATAM/archaeometallurgy/chimir.html ]

Bronze Mirror, 7th Century
 

For the Maya people today this kind of creation is still repeated as part of ceremonies to restore the correct balance of the world. David Freidel describes a ceremony he witnessed to bring to an end a prolonged drought. The officiant (referred to as h-men, 'a do-er') constructed an altar known as a 'sky-tree'. A table is overarched by four saplings bent to intersect above its centre. From this intersection is hung a circular platform referred to as the 'the sky-platform' .

'Sturdy vines of a kind called xtab ka'anil, 'the 'cords of the sky', completed the arches to form the 'sky tree'. In the Yukatek language, the words for 'sky' and the number 'four' are near homophones and frequently substitute for each other in the ancient writing system'.

Source: http://www.mythofcreation.co.uk/CreationText/Creation4_1text.htm

Mysterious Alignment of Ancient Sites of the World

The sites: Giza, Siwa, Tassili n'Ajjer, Paratoari, Ollantaytambo, Machupicchu, Nazca, Easter Island, Aneityum Island, Preah Vihear, Sukhothai, Pyay, Khajuraho, Mohenjo Daro, Persepolis, Ur, Petra  are shown clockwise from Giza on the equal azimuthal projection. below. The projection is centered on the axis point in southeastern Alaska. Distances to any location from the center of an equal azimuthal projection are equally scaled. Since all of the sites on the great circle alignment are equally distant from the axis point at one quarter of the circumference of the earth, the alignment forms a perfect circle halfway between the center and the outer edge of the projection.

The locations of world's ancient sites on a global scale is puzzling on its own. However, our discussion is focused on astronomical alignments of these sites and their monuments.

Unsolved mystery - Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments, Wilfrid Voynich estimated that the Manuscript was created in the late 13th century. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages. It is written in an unknown script of which there is no known other instance in the world. 

The Voynich Manuscript is considered to be 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World'. To this day this medieval artifact resists all efforts at translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. The manuscript is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953).

The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher manuscript, sometimes attributed to Roger Bacon.
Scientific text in an unidentified language, in cipher, possibly written in central Europe in the 15th century.

Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the "biological" section

"Tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs" - a fragment of page 70
Copyright: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityPage 70r  Image Source >>

No one really knows the origins of the manuscript. The experts believe it is European  They believe it was written between the 15th and 17th centuries.

There is no other example of the language in which the manual is written.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different "languages" (investigated by Currier and D'Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.

View online The Centuries or consider getting some of many  books written about Nostradamus and his prophecies.

View online The Centuries or consider getting some of many  books written about Nostradamus and his prophecies.

Unsolved mystery - A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets.

Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala's Petén region, a team of archaeologists lead by Boston University Assistant Professor of Archaeology William Saturno has uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings -- one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms -- and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar.

One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya -- the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, reports Saturno, who led the exploration and excavation.

"For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," Saturno said. "It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard."

The discovery is reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science.

The project scientists say that despite popular belief, there is no sign that the Maya calendar -- or the world -- was to end in the year 2012, just one of its calendar cycles. "It's like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000," said Anthony Aveni,, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, a coauthor of the Science paper. "The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over; the Maya just start over."

The mural represents the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house. "There are tiny glyphs all over the wall, bars and dots representing columns of numbers. It's the kind of thing that only appears in one place -- the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later. We've never seen anything like it," said David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, who deciphered the glyphs.

The vegetation-covered structure was first spotted in 2010 by Saturno's student Max Chamberlain, who was following looters' trenches to explore the site of Xultún, hidden in the remote rain forest of the Petén. Then, supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, Saturno and his team launched an organized exploration and excavation of the house, working urgently to beat the region's rainy seasons, which threatened to erase what time had so far preserved.

Xultún, a 12-square-mile site where tens of thousands once lived, was first discovered about 100 years ago by Guatemalan workers and roughly mapped in the 1920s by Sylvanus Morley, who named the site "Xultún" -- "end stone." Scientists from Harvard University mapped more of the site in the 1970s. The house discovered by Saturno's team was numbered 54 of 56 structures counted and mapped at that time. Thousands at Xultún remain uncounted.

The team's excavations reveal that monumental construction at Xultún began in the first centuries B.C. The site thrived until the end of the Classic Maya period; the site's last carved monument dates to around 890 A.D. Xultún stood only about five miles from San Bartolo, where in 2001 Saturno found rare, extensive murals painted on the walls of a ritual structure by the ancient Maya.

"It's weird that the Xultún finds exist at all," Saturno said. "Such writings and artwork on walls don't preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a meter below the surface."

The Writing on the Walls

The house contains three intact walls, each telling its own story to researchers -- and posing its own mysteries:

The north wall lies straight ahead as one enters the room. An off-center niche in the wall features a painting of a seated king, wearing blue feathers. A long rod made of bone mounted on the wall allowed a curtain to be pulled across the king's portrait, hiding it and revealing a well-preserved painting of a man whose image is wrapped around the wall; he is depicted in vibrant orange and holds a pen. Maya glyphs near his face call him "Younger Brother Obsidian," a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. "The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family," Saturno said.

Four long numbers on the wall representing one-third of a million to 2.5 million days likely bring together all of the astronomical cycles -- such as those of Mars, Venus and the lunar eclipses -- the Maya thought important, dates that stretch some 7,000 years into the future. This is the first place Maya archaeologists have found that seems to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Another number scratched into the plaster surface likely records the date -- 813 A.D., a time when the Maya world had begun to collapse.

The west wall: Three male figures loom on this wall, all of them seated and painted in black, wearing only white loincloths, medallions around their necks and identical single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. "We haven't seen uniform head dresses like that anywhere before," Saturno said. "It's clearly a costume of some kind." One of the figures is particularly burly, "like a sumo wrestler," and he is labeled "Older Brother Obsidian." Another is labeled as a youth.

The east wall: Although badly eroded, another black-painted human figure and remnants of others can be seen. But the wall is dominated by numerical figures, including columns of numbers representing counting and calendrical calculations. Some of the numbers track the phases of the moon; others try to reconcile lunar periods with the solar calendar. "Skywatching like this was a tool for predicting eclipses," Saturno said. One well-preserved section contains numerical notes painted in red that appear to be corrections to more formal calculations appearing alongside them.

"The most exciting point is that we now see that the Maya were making such computations hundreds of years -- and in places other than books -- before they recorded them in the Codices," Aveni said.

The scientists say the symbols reflect a certain world view. "The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this," Saturno said. "We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."

Source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120510141905.htm

Unsolved mystery - NOAA-sponsored explorers are searching a wild, largely unexplored and forgotten coastline for evidence and artifacts of one of the greatest seafaring traditions of the ancient New World, where Maya traders once paddled massive dugout canoes filled with trade goods from across Mexico and Central America. One exploration goal is to discover the remains of a Maya trading canoe, described in A.D. 1502 by Christopher Columbus' son Ferdinand, as holding 25 paddlers plus cargo and passengers.

Through the end of May, the team is exploring the remote jungle, mangrove forests and lagoons at the ancient port site of Vista Alegre ("happy view" in Spanish) where the Caribbean meets the Gulf of Mexico at the northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Scientists believe the port was part of an important trading network and was used at various times between about 800 B.C. and A.D. 1521, the date scholars use to designate the start of Spanish rule.

"The maritime Maya have been described much like ancient seagoing Phoenicians. They traded extensively in a wide variety of goods, such as bulk cotton and salt, and likely incense from tree sap called copal, jade, obsidian, cacao, Quetzal and other tropical bird feathers, and even slaves," said Dominique Rissolo, Ph.D., expedition co-chief scientist and director of the Waitt Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "Maya trade was far-ranging between the Veracruz coast of modern Mexico and the Gulf of Honduras, with each port a link in a chain connecting people and ideas. Yet there is still much to learn about the extensive history and importance of the maritime Maya and how they adapted to life by the sea."

"Maritime economies were strengthened and far-ranging trade routes were established between A.D. 850 and 1100," said Jeffrey Glover, Ph.D., expedition co-chief scientist with Georgia State University's Department of Anthropology in Atlanta. "It was during this time when the Maya at Chichen Itza relied increasingly on maritime commerce to maintain and extend control over much of the Yucatan peninsula. The period most associated with Maya seafaring followed, between A.D. 1100 and 1521."

Recent archaeological work at Vista Alegre included completion of an architectural map of the site, test excavations to obtain cultural materials, and a 13-mile reconnaissance of coastal environments that revealed a number of small ancient and historical sites and cultural features.

During expeditions at the port site in 2005 and 2008, explorers mapped 29 structures including platforms, mounds, raised causeways, and a concrete-filled 35-foot tall, steep-sided pyramid that dominates the central plaza and appears to have been heavily damaged by hurricanes. Explorers believe the summit of the pyramid was also used by lookouts to monitor approaching and departing canoes. In addition to the features on the island, a narrow walkway connects the port to a collapsed and looted temple 0.8 miles away on the mainland.

The expedition team also includes co-chief scientists Patricia Beddows, Ph.D., of Northwestern University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Evanston, Illinois; Beverly Goodman, Ph.D., of the Leon Charnet School of Marines Sciences at the University of Haifa, Israel; and Derek Smith, of the University of Washington Department of Biology. Emily McDonald of NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research is on the team to coordinate Web coverage.

Two scientists from Mexico and a small number of U.S. students will join parts of the expedition, which will also provide post-expedition technical reports to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History. A goal of the exploration is to enable Mexico to better protect and preserve its coastal and submerged cultural resources.

The explorers are contending with many of the same challenges that faced ancient Maya seafarers, including shelter -- as some team members will be in tents and slung hammocks -- the remoteness of the area that is accessible only by boat, the scarcity of fresh water, the possibility of tropical storms, and the danger and nuisance of a variety of local inhabitants, including mosquitoes, snakes, spiders and crocodiles.

"The Maya largely had to live off the land in this remote area where they found and used resources to survive. Like them, we have to search for scarce fresh water, but our challenges are more about making the research work in less than optimal conditions. It will involve some good MacGyvering," said Glover, referring to the television actor who used ingenuity and materials at hand to invent his way out of a fix.

The expedition is part of Proyecto Costa Escondida (Hidden Coast Project), a long-term interdisciplinary research effort co-directed by Glover and Rissolo and focused on the dynamic relationship between the Maya and their coastal landscape.

Source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110523080535.htm