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The Lost City of Nan Madol

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There are no existing records that can answer questions about who built the city, when the city was built, how it was built, or even why it was built. Archeologists have uncovered human bones that belonged to people considerably larger than the Micronesians who live there today. They have also uncovered pottery shards that have been "thermo-luminescence" dated as being at least 2000 years old. Adding to the mystery are the persistent rumors and physical evidence of another sunken city, Madolynym, in the water near Nan Madol.

The Lost City of Nan Madol

The Mayan Calendar

The Piri Reis Map 

The Voynich Manuscript

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.Recommended Books:
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Ancient Micronesia 
& the Lost City of 
Nan Madol 
click here

The Piri Reis Map of 1513
click here

The Mayan Calendar

The ancient Mayans were a very intelligent race with a highly developed culture. Within the ruins of their cities we find, not only temples and various other public structures, we also find massive observatories. The evidence is overwhelming that the Mayans were accomplished astronomers.  There is also compelling evidence that they were accomplished physicians performing delicate brain surgeries.

Even with their obvious interest in the sciences, it is startling to consider their legacy of a remarkable 365 day calendar, and even more remarkable, their mathematical calculations.

The Mayans somehow knew that a year on the planet Venus was 584 days long.  From this, they apparently devised a formula that allowed them to calculate the duration of the terrestrial year.  The Mayan calculation is 365.2420 days (the exact scientific calculation today is 365.2422 days).  

The Mayan's Venusian Formula:
The Tzolkin has 260 days, the terrestrial year has 365 days, and the Venusian year has 584 days. These figures conceal an astonishing bit of division. 365 is divisible by 73, five times, and 584 is divisible by 73, eight times, so the incredible formula takes this form:

(Moon) 20 x 13 = 260 x 2 x 73 = 37,960
(Sun)     8 x 13 = 104 x 5 x 73 = 37,960 
(Venus)   5 x 13 = 65 x 8 x 73 = 37,960  

This means that all cycles coincide after 37,960 days.  Mayan mythology states that at this time, the "gods" come together at the great resting place.

The Piri Reis Map

Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral in the sixteenth century, was credited as the most brilliant cartographer of his time. While he was most certainly an extremely competent cartographer, it was his passion for collecting old navigational maps that fueled his insights placing him in possession of some of the most curious ancient charts and maps ever imagined.

His primary sources for these antiquities must have been in the bazaars of exotic ports and possibly from captured enemy ships. In 1513, Admiral Piri Reis compiled the first World Map using information from his collection of ancient charts. While the actual source of the remarkably detailed geographic information is still in question, it was this map (presented to Sultan Selim I in 1517) and a subsequent World Map that served as the catalyst for his fame.

In the 1500’s, his maps were considered to be extraordinary, and now more than 487 years later, the only known surviving piece of the map continues to amaze and startle scholars and scientists with the information it contains. Not only is the Piri Reis map far more accurate than any map of its time, the map has recently been used to correct several 20th century maps.

In examining the Piri Reis map, the modern scientific community is astonished to discover that the map shows the coastal outlines of South and North America. It also includes precise data on the southern polar continent, Antarctica, which was supposedly not discovered until 1818. Equally astonishing, Antarctica is shown to be free of ice depicting a topology that we only know of due to modern radar measurements.

One characteristic of the map did puzzle scholars however; much of the geographical data on the map was not in the correct position and appeared distorted. Working with the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Bureau, Arlington T. Mallerey, an authority on ancient maps, constructed a grid to allow the map to be overlain on a globe. The result was truly astounding as the Piri Reis map then proved to be totally accurate.

Research by Professor Charles H. Hapgood and Richard W. Strachan suggests the originals of the Piri Reis charts may have been aerial pictures snapped at a great height. They point out that the rivers, mountain ranges, islands, and other features of the Earth’s topology, were drawn with an accuracy that would have been un-attainable in the 16^th Century. For example, Greenland was represented as two separate islands. This was confirmed just recently by a French polar expedition conducting a seismic survey. The seismic readings indicated that a thick (ancient) ice flow covers an area separating two distinct landmasses.

Scholars have not been able to answer the question as to how anyone living in the sixteenth century could have constructed such a highly accurate map. Interestingly, modern analysis reveals a strong resemblance between the Piri Reis World Map and photographs taken from space with the city of Cairo, Egypt in the center. While the Piri Reis Map is certainly a mystery, the real enigma is the source of the information used to create the map.

Recommended Book:



The Piri Reis Map of 1513
click here for more information or to buy.

The Voynich Manuscript

Just two years before the outbreak of the First World War, an American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, was traveling Europe in search of rare medieval illuminated manuscripts. While examining a large collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, he discovered a very rare and completely inexplicable manuscript.

This manuscript was unlike any other that had ever been found in that it was written in an unknown script, with characters and symbols that are different than that of any known language in the world. The manuscript is also lavishly illustrated with odd drawings of plants, stars, and alchemical symbols. To this day, the interpretation of the manuscript has baffled scholars and historians. In recognition of Wilfred’s re-discovery of this remarkable work, the manuscript was given the name "The Voynich Manuscript."

In an earlier time, the manuscript was part of a collection owned by a resident of Prague. In 1639, the manuscript’s owner Georg Baresch, wrote to the famous Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher, telling him of the mysterious work. He explained to the scientist that the manuscript was written in a script that he could not understand and that it was profusely illustrated with awkward and oddly colored drawings. Baresch believed that Kircher would be able to decipher the manuscript. The famous scientist, however, was never able to decipher the document, and neither have a long and distinguished list of modern-day linguists and cryptographers who have tried to make sense of the manuscript.

While no one knows of the origin of the manuscript, scientific analysis of the paper and the pigments of the colored inks along with a scholarly assessment of the style of the calligraphy and drawings, suggest that the manuscript dates back to at least the 13^th century.

The time in which the Voynich manuscript was thought to have originated was a period of treachery, persecution, and betrayal. In those harsh times it was a foolish man who wrote down a secret in any way other than one in which it would be concealed from his enemies or detractors. In the late medieval period, the craft of cryptography was (thought to be) somewhat unsophisticated using relatively simple methods such as words written backward, or replacing vowels with symbols or even dots. Cryptograms (ciphers) were used not only to conceal maters of the church and state, but were also used to conceal alchemical and magical writings, which their authors considered too powerful or too incriminating, to fall into the wrong hands.

The Vatican and the Italian city-states were pioneers in the development of the cryptogram.  In 1379, the first of the Avignon popes, Clement VII, had separate cryptographic systems constructed for each of twenty-four correspondents.  As cryptography evolved, ciphers developed more complex methods, languages, and algorithms that were unknown and unintelligible to their own race or others and would require men of science or scholar to decipher (with a great deal of effort.)

The Manuscript:

For some very strange reason the actual length of the manuscript is debated. Some researchers assess that it is 200 pages, while others consider it to be only 170 pages in length. Part of the disagreement is largely due to two points of view.  One point of view suggests some believe it is an incomplete document, and evidence suggests several pages have disappeared over the years. Therefore, it is impossible to say with any certainty how long the manuscript may be. The other point of view suggests it is constructed in a "folio" style with certain pages folding multiple times into the book, and that when opened, they prove to be up to six times the size of other pages in the manuscript.

With various speculations that the manuscript is some kind of ancient alchemist’s guide or a book of mystical spells, enchantments, and incantations concealed in a secret script, the manuscript has provided a few clues at least to its structure. Several researchers feel that the illustrations actually identify topical sections of the manuscript (although, this is still in the realm of speculation since the script has in no way been deciphered):

Manuscript Sections:

• Astronomical section (with what appear to be zodiac symbols)

• Herbal section (unidentified fantasy plants)

• Pharmaceutical section (vases, pedestals & parts of plants)

• Biological section ('anatomical' drawings & human figures)

• Cosmological section (circles, stars & celestial spheres)

• Recipes section (section with short paragraphs)

The Script:

The "script" appears to be an alphabetic script. The alphabet appears (depending on the scholar that you ask) to have between nineteen to twenty-eight letters, (again disagreement on the count) none of which appear to bear any relationship to any English or European alphabetic system. Other symbols are largely unrecognizable but hint at being of alchemical or astrological intent.

As with the clues provided with the illustrations, there are also artifacts within the script that may provide useful clues to eventually deciphering the manuscript, such as:

• several 'key-like' (cryptographic) sequences throughout the book

• margin notes in archaic German (probably added later in a deciphering attempt)

• names of the months in the astronomical section (appear to have been added later)

• extraneous writing that is different from the rest of the manuscript

• pagination and gathering numbers

The Illustrations:

As long as the script cannot be deciphered and read, the illustrations are really the only clue that could reveal the true nature of the book. According to these illustrations, the manuscript would appear to be some type of scientific book. While many of the drawings seem to be of a herbal or horticultural nature, the plants are not recognizable as plants that grow or have grown on earth.

In addition, there are drawings that are rendered in an odd geometric style and have a mathematical or astrological sense about them. Many interpreters feel that many of the "chart like" illustrations depict astronomical objects as might be seen through a telescope, or as others suggest, live cells as might be observed through a powerful microscope.

Stranger still are numerous illustrations that include images of tiny naked women, who appear to be taking baths or showers wrapped in some sort of strange apparatus. In other illustrations the nude images appear to be part of intricate plumbing systems, with the connections appearing to be anatomical rather than hydraulic, emanating from various parts of their bodies.

Deciphering Attempts:

Attempts to unravel the coded mystery of the manuscript have occurred many, many times over several hundred years, all of which have failed. Noted scholars and both private and military cryptographers have applied their best efforts to the task, but so far no one has solved even a fragment of the mystery. In several instances, frustrated scholars and cryptographers have suggested that the manuscript is a hoax, created in the dark-ages to simply defraud noblemen out of large sums of money.

(In 1586, Rudolph II of Bohemia, purchased the manuscript for three hundred gold ducats, or in today’s equivalent, roughly fourteen to fifteen thousand dollars.)

There is one perplexing flaw in the hoax theory however, and that is certain word structures and statistics found in the manuscript are characteristic of natural languages (according to Zipf's laws first postulated in 1935). What this really means to the scholars is that it is extremely unlikely that any forgery from the 15 or 16th century would "by mere chance" produce a text that follows these linguistics laws. Furthering the mystery, in 1976, a Captain Prescott Currier discovered, and was able to provide convincing evidence that the Voynich Manuscript must have been developed by at least two different authors and in reality two different languages.

This discovery of this additional "cryptographic" complexity at least offers clues as to why the best minds in the world have struggled to unravel the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.


The Voynich Manuscript is currently archived at the Beinecke Rare Book Room at Yale and is accessible to serious scholars and researchers. [catalogue number MS 408] 
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