Unanswered - Mysteries from the Mahabharata | Christopher Charles Doyle | TEDxYouth@NMS

Translator: Hélène Vernet Reviewer: Heba Alshrbagy In promotions for this TED talk I have been called a "tail spinner", a "word artist", but I'm not going to spin tails today. I'm going to present you with facts based on science and history, and let you answer for yourself what it all means. We all know this knight as Alexander the Great. Everyone knows him. But did you know that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence to prove that Alexander the Great existed? That's not in the history books. Everything we know about this man comes from the writings of three historians who lived between 150 and 400 years after Alexander's death: Strabo, Arrian, and Plutarch.

But Alexander is not mythology; He is History. So, I'm going to explore some

unanswered

questions from the Mahabharata that I've been researching for about 12 years. I'm not going to give you answers, but I will give you some ideas that I hope will challenge you to be curious about what could be and what is. Here is the first question: Did the Mahabharata really happen? The events in the Mahabharata, which are not just the Kurukshetra war, are only 8,800 shlokas, or verses, out of one lakh shlokas in the Mahabharata, did all the events described there happen? It's a very common question.

Did the fantastic weapons we hear about in the Mahabharata really exist? And if they did, how could these people, more than 5,000 years ago, have that kind of science and technology? And then, the question that guided me on my journey as a fiction writer: Are there scientific explanations for some of the things we read in the Mahabharata? This is an important topic that I am currently researching: Were there giants at the time of the Mahabharata? We hear about the Devas, the Asuras and the Rakshasas, these enormous beings of gigantic stature... Were they real? Let's explore this, but I'll start by taking you on a tour of the world.

We are going to talk about some unexplained

mysteries

and then we will return to the Mahabharata. I'm going to start with Egypt. The Great Pyramid is one of the most famous monuments in the world. It is currently 457 feet tall, the equivalent size of a 45-story building. History books tell us that it was built around 2550 BC. C. by a pharaoh named Cheops, as a tomb for himself. Now, when the Great Pyramid was built, it was closed. This is its original entry, which was discovered perhaps 50 or 60 years ago. It was hidden, hidden by the rock wall that today can be seen scattered around the entrance.

Therefore, no one could enter the pyramid after its construction. It was closed and sealed. In 800 AD, the governor of Cairo, a knight named Mohammed Al Mamum, decided that he wanted to enter. Because? Because he believed that if a pharaoh was big enough to build a 45-story tomb, he must have many treasures inside. Then, Al Mamun and his men dug a tunnel to the Great Pyramid using what is today called "the thieves' entrance." Tourists today enter the Great Pyramid through this entrance. But to their great surprise and disappointment, when they entered, they found absolutely nothing. The walls were bare, without inscriptions.

Unlike all the Egyptian tombs he would discover, there were no inscriptions on the walls. There was no mummy or treasure. He must have been a very sad man. Now this is the lower hole, the entrance of thieves; the top is the original entry; so you can see what I'm talking about, a close up of these. What is also very interesting about the Great Pyramid is the labyrinth of passages and tunnels inside. And you can see that if this was built as a tomb, it would have been very difficult for them to carry Pharaoh's body through these passages because none of them are in a straight line.

They're all at crazy angles. Let's look at some of the angles. Look at the Grand Gallery. Today it has a ramp that you can see at the base of the photograph. This ramp allows us to climb it, but when it was explored about 150 years ago there was no ramp, and you can see how difficult it is to walk alone, forget about carrying a corpse with you. Most of these tunnels that I've shown you, the network of tunnels, most of them are about 2.5 or 3 feet high, like this one here and this one here, which means you have to crawl on your hands and knees. go through them;

It's not a big job if you have a pharaoh's mummy with you. So the question really is: why? Why was this 45-story building built 5,000 years ago enclosed with all these passages, three chambers and, interestingly, tunnels from the King's Chamber opening to the sky, like this? This is where it opens onto the north face of the pyramid. Two tunnels emerge from the Queen's Chamber that were explored about 15 years ago. This is a screenshot from National Geographic where you can see that the tunnels are blocked. So why build them? Unanswered. There is a lot of speculation, but today I don't get into speculation.

The Sphinx is another fabulous mystery. We are told that the Sphinx was built by Pharaoh Khafre, who was the son of Khufu, and therefore built it around 2500 BC. For a long time, this was accepted by History. You can see how big the Sphinx is by looking at the size of the human being next to it. This is just the shoulder, neck and head of the Sphinx. It is a huge structure. Here is another shot showing the size of the Sphinx. In the 1990s, a geology professor at Boston University, Dr. Robert Schoch, came onto the scene and asked Egyptologists a very interesting question.

He said, "How do you know the Sphinx was built in 2500 BC?" The fascinating answer was: "Well, we don't really know. We think it was built in 2500 BC because you can't date the stone. If you dated it, it would be billions of years old, right? So, Robert Schoch, As a scientist, he said, "It's not good enough for me, I'm going to do some geological tests." And his tests shocked the world because what they showed was that erosion can be seen on the Sphinx and elsewhere. enclosure surrounding the Sphinx were caused by heavy rain, and we know for sure that there has not been much rain in Egypt after about 5000 or 6000 BC, which means that the Sphinx could not have been built in 2500 BC. 6000 BC, probably even eight, nine, 10,000 BC, we don't know, but it's an ancient monument, and the question then is: who built it?

We were all cavemen and women in those days, right? using stone tools. We didn't have the technology or science to build a massive structure like this... However, someone did. I visited this as a tourist about 12 years ago, but only while I was researching for my latest book, I spent two weeks researching this deeply into the site. And I discovered something about it that blew me away: 70-ton stone blocks placed upright and 70-ton stone blocks on top. The stones on top also weigh 70 tons. The first question is: in 2400 BC, which is the officially accepted date for this, how did they do it?

How did they lift these stones 30 feet in the air and put them on top with this complex engineering involved here? This is called a "mortise and tenon joint" in woodworking; in modern carpentry, but obviously they knew that. Each of the upright stones has these two projections called "spikes." The mortise holes of the stones above fit into them, thereby locking the stone in place. And if you look closely, there is a tongue-and-groove joint, like a puzzle, on the sides of the stones. So not only do you have to lift the stones, but once one fits, that's great, the second stone has to fit the tenon, the mortise tenon joint has to fit as well as the tongue and groove joint, and you are standing here. , pulling him 30 feet in the air, possibly with only ropes to help him achieve it.

In the 1950s they rebuilt Stonehenge using cranes, but in 2400 BC. They didn't have cranes. How did they do this? Here you can see the mortise holes. Here is a shot of one of the spike projections. Here, if you look very carefully, you can see the tongue of a stone on this stone that is flat on top. Let me take you to Wales. This is a fascinating place; When I saw it, it blew my mind again because magical things happen here, and I'll tell you just one of them. It is supposed to be a burial chamber in a place called Bryn Celli Ddu.

The entrance to this chamber faces northeast. Every year, between December and April, the sun rises in the northeast; It rises from the northeast in winter in the northern hemisphere. It shines through this entrance and illuminates a stone pillar within the chamber. Now, it's no big deal, right? The interesting thing is that the stone chamber is where the blue line is. It is not aligned with the entrance, so obviously the sunlight reflects off the walls of the chamber and illuminates the pillar, and you can see that it is reflective. It is rock covered with quartz. Here's the magic: I don't know if you can see, there are grooves carved into the rock.

Here's a closeup; you can see it clearly now. So here's what happens: Every day, starting in December, the sun shines through the hallway and illuminates a different notch each day. It climbs from the base of the pillar in December to the top of the pillar in April. This, my friends, is a 5,000-year-old calendar. Just by looking at which notch is illuminated, you will know the day of the year in winter between December and April. Built in the year 3000 BC, according to what archaeologists tell us. Five thousand years ago, how could they build a parabolic mirror, which is what the walls of the chambers are?

How could they do something like this? It's amazing. Questions without answer. Now, about twenty years ago, when I started researching this, some very interesting theories were proposed. One of the pioneers of this is a gentleman called Graham Hancock. He and others of his ilk used a lot of science to create a theory that there was an ancient global civilization, which had advanced in science and technology and was wiped out by a global flood 12,000 years ago. Interestingly, recent discoveries have provided fascinating evidence of this. We now know that in the year 10,900 B.C. a comet hit the Earth.

It broke into fragments and hit the Earth at different points that are now marked by what is called the "younger Dryas boundary", and melted the ice sheet. Anyway, the ice age was ending. Sea level rose causing a global flood. Volcanoes erupted; Ash filled the atmosphere. Over 1,300 years, temperatures dropped dramatically, as you can see, I'll just show you. These animals in North America became completely extinct. One of the biggest

mysteries

, until this discovery was made about the comet that hit Earth, was why all these animals disappeared at the same time 12,000 years ago. This is an ice core report from the Greenland ice sheet showing that 15,000 years ago there was an increase in temperature.

The ice age is ending and suddenly the temperature drops below what it was during the Ice Age. That's when the comet hit. Thirteen hundred years later, the temperature returns to normal. Another fascinating discovery made in 2008 (I don't know if you've heard of this) is that this archaeological team working in Russia in a cave called Denisova discovered a tooth, a big tooth. The surface area of ​​this tooth is approximately two and a half times larger than that of our teeth, a human tooth. So they thought this must belong to a large, now extinct animal, like some of the ones I just showed you, and sent it for DNA testing to try to find out who it belonged to.

Imagine their shock when the DNA test showed that this tooth belonged to a human being, a human species that we didn't know existed until this tooth was found, not Homo sapiens which is what we are - Homo sapiens sapiens - but they had to give you a new name, they called them "Denisovans". I'm going to share three surprising discoveries you'll find in scientific reports on Denisovans from the past nine years. The first is that all the people living today in the geographic areas covered by the Green Earth, which is quite substantial, all have Denisovan DNA; 2.4% of our DNA is Denisovan DNA, this is a fact.

The second interesting thing was this bracelet. The Denisovans lived between 30 and 40 thousand years ago. This bracelet is between 30 and 40 thousand years old. We believe it was made by the Denisovans. I'm not going to dwell on the beauty of the bracelet, but instead focus on that small hole on the side of the bracelet that is a millimeter in diameter: very small, very fine. Scientists who performed physical tests on this hole say it could have been done, and I quote from the report: "it could only have been done with a high-speed drill," otherwise the stone would have shattered.

A high-speed drill 30,000 years ago? This was also mind-blowing: just as we have Denisovan DNA, Denisovans have DNA that belongs to another human species that we have not yet discovered. There are still mysteries waiting to be solved. There are still discoveries to be made, if we arecurious enough to challenge our existing beliefs and look for evidence. Science is leading the way now. Now I am going to return to the

unanswered

questions of the Mahabharata, and I hope to leave you with thoughts, not answers, but thoughts... that will lead you to the curiosity to learn more about this.

Did the events described in the Mahabharata really occur? There is absolutely no archaeological evidence to prove that the events of the Mahabharata happened. There is also no archaeological evidence to prove that Alexander the Great existed. Is it possible that the weapons described in the Mahabharata really existed? Did they have the scientific knowledge to create those types of weapons? Can there be a scientific basis for some of the things described in the Mahabharata? We can't say for sure. What we do know for sure is that between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago there were people we did not know until now.

There were people who had some kind of technology. We don't know what it was, but they did it. We know they had engineering techniques, like this one and Bryn Celli Ddu's, to create complex buildings, some of which we can't make today. Today we couldn't build a Great Pyramid if we wanted to. The Sushruta Samhita, written in 1000 BC. C., is a manual on brain surgery, and one of its techniques, called the "flap technique" of plastic surgery, is still used today, in the 21st century: a 3,000-year-old text. While I was researching I found it very interesting: The sulbasutras written in the first millennium BC, the first date of what we know today as the Pythagorean theorem.

They used geometry; and the square root of two is defined. Let me show you very quickly. In those days, in the Vedic era, we had altars. We didn't have temples, we had altars. This is an example: four levels: A, B, C, D; each level had a different type of brick, hence A-B-C-D; 196 bricks. It could not have been done without the use of geometry. This is the definition of the Pythagorean theorem given by the Baudhayana Sulbasutras; is there. And the square root of two is pretty close to our modern value. Were there really giants in the Mahabharata?

The Denisovans must have been a fairly large people. I'm not saying they are the Mahabharata people, but it's interesting. So I'm going to end here and like I said, I hope I've given you enough to challenge your thoughts and look for more. Thank you.