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Mar 04 '26
Just wonder what else is buried underneath the sands of the vast Sahara!
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u/Fung_us_ Mar 04 '26
And what's covered in the Mediterranean shallows.
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u/SeekingLostInnocence Mar 04 '26
Or what's under all those clothes on the floor in my room
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u/pbizzle Mar 04 '26
What's under all those clothes your wearing 😉
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u/InmateQuarantine2021 Mar 04 '26
Or in the Jungles of Mesoamerica. We are already starting to see that the Maya had a civilization to rival some of the "first civilizations" and will likely re-write history to include them as one of the founding civilizations.
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u/Happy-Fun-Ball Mar 04 '26
or what frozen treasures are being lost as arctic ice melts away
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u/Fung_us_ Mar 04 '26
I love the unimagined treasures that we have yet to find. Our history being revealed.
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u/RedDorf Mar 04 '26
'Desert Kites' from the Holocene, for one!
My favourite old-old site: Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was purposefully buried more than 5,000 years before the Giza pyramids were built.
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u/darkenseyreth Mar 04 '26
Miniminutemen on YouTube has a whole series in Turkey where he visits that site. It's pretty wild to see sites that ancient.
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u/yadasellsavonmate Mar 04 '26
Yep, if you look on Google earth, giza is literally right at the edge of the desert, and apparently the desert wasn't there a few thousand years ago.
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u/OfficialGaiusCaesar Mar 04 '26
That’s not true. The African Humid Period ended roughly 5500 years ago. It was desert when the pyramids were built too.
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u/TyrannosaurusBoris Mar 04 '26
5000 years ago qualifies as a few thousand years ago in the grand scale of things.
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u/yadasellsavonmate Mar 04 '26
Yeah, and humans have been in that area for around 50,000 years. They definitely were in the Sahara before it was a desert, there's probably lots of stuff hidden under it.
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u/iam1whoknocks Mar 04 '26
A civilization that was betore than ancient Egypt. They simply built on top of it.
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Mar 04 '26
And that could be just the tip of the iceberg! Forget mars lets properly investigate earth first.
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u/GkAyub Mar 04 '26
So the deeper we go, the more past civilizations we uncover?
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u/MongolianCluster Mar 04 '26
I saw a show where there were eight past civilizations at one spot. Archeologists dug right through the one they were looking for while digging through all of them and only after cataloging them all did they realize which layer was their initial target. It was wild.
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u/Angel_Omachi Mar 04 '26
I think that was the excavation of ancient Troy, the guy digging was looking for Illiad era and got it wrong.
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u/LimpyDan Mar 04 '26
And the dude used dynamite to get there. So he destroyed other civilizations history just to blow past the one he was looking for.
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u/GrumpySatan Mar 04 '26
You know how when you don't dust your house it can build up and be harder to remove?
That is happening to the entire earth at every moment. Wind, rain, volcanoes, all whip up dust and soil and it falls back down. Everything is steadily being buried if its not cleaned off.
Over hundreds of years, your structures get buried. Before you know if there is a new group building on top of it. And then another. We find them digging up subways
Though at about 50 meters deep it ends and we get to pre-civilization times.
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u/cabbagehandLuke Mar 04 '26
It's civilizations all the way down
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u/Erestyn Mar 04 '26
Until you get to the excited corgi with its running sphere, of course. Then it's civilizations all the way up.
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u/iam1whoknocks Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
Yes. The infrastructure before was strategicand sound for civilizational survival. Whatever flood or disaster wiped it away during the Younger Dryas. The next set of humans just built on top of them.
Similar things humans usually did in major cities all over the world after a wipeout. Big cities in Europe like London and Paris are all built on top of the previous.
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u/lcarlson6082 Mar 04 '26
The vast majority of the Sahara is not sand-covered. Most is gravel, salt flats, and bare rock.
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u/RealityOk9823 Mar 04 '26
According to one crappy movie, there's a civil war ironclad out there.
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u/mucinexmonster Mar 04 '26
Just wonder how much Armenian History has been purposefully destroyed by the Turkish government to cover up their stolen land.
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u/supermoneytan Mar 04 '26
there’s a memorable passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis where he describes the Ten Thousand marching past the ruins of ancient Assyrian cities (likely Nimrud and Nineveh) during their retreat through Mesopotamia around 400 BCE. There’s a real sense of awe in his words - these soldiers were marching through the ghostly wreckage of a civilization they knew almost nothing about, with only vague local stories to explain the monumental stonework around them.
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u/toomanymarbles83 Mar 04 '26
Things like this always remind of me of that scene in Lord of the Rings, when the pass by the two stone Kings. Really great way to show this world isn't just old, it's ancient.
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u/rvtcanuck Mar 08 '26
I think an even better example is the barrow downs and Amon Sûl. The Argonath are monuments largely unchanged by time, but the ruins of Arnor really are relics of a lost civilization.
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u/ChillStreetGamer Mar 04 '26
After this defeat the enemy withdrew, and theGreeks carried on safely for the rest of the day, until they reached the Tigris. Here they found a large, deserted city called Larisa, which in the old days had been inhabited by Medes. Its wall ( which was made from clay bricks on a stone foundation twenty feet tall), was 25 feet thick and a hundred feet high, and had a perimter of 2 parasangs. The persian King had beseiged the city during the Persian Annexation of the Median Empire, but nothing he tried enabled him to take it.But then a cloud hid the sun from sight until the inhabitents left, and so the city fell. Near by there was a pyramid made of stone, which was one plethron wide and two pletrhra high, and was being used as a place of refuge by a lot of barbarians from the neighboring villages.
The next leg was a 1 day march of 6 parasangs that brought them to a large, deserted fortress, close to a city called Mespila, which was once inhabited by the Medes, The foundation of the fortress was made from polished, shell-bearing stone, and was fifty feet thick, and a hundred feet tall, with the perimeter of six parasangs,. This is supposed to be the plkace where Medea, the Kings wife, took refuge after the Persian COnquest of the Median Empire. The Persian King beseiged the city, but neighther attrition nor direct assaultenaled him to take it -but then Zeus stupefied the inhabitents with thunder, and the King succeded in taking it, Oxfordf World Classic edition, The Expedition of Cyrus by Xenophon Book 3 chap4
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u/L3berwurst Mar 04 '26
So fascinating with so much history that we can only speculate on.
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u/_Troxin_ Mar 04 '26
It's really interesting to think about what archaelogical treasures might be burried in the sand there.
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u/StoneMakesMusic Mar 04 '26
They've found a lot of that. Theres probably so much shit in the amazon thats waiting to be found
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u/Wrong-Catchphrase Mar 04 '26
If someone gave me a time machine I would do nothing useful with it at all. I'd just use it to bop around the world between 5,000 - 10,000 BC to see how much we got wrong. Check out a bunch of weird hidden civilizations that no ones ever heard of.
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u/Exo-Noodle Mar 04 '26
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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u/Malk_McJorma Interested Mar 04 '26
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
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u/Exo-Noodle Mar 04 '26
It’s absolutely my favorite poem
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u/United_Rent_753 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
I’ve since lost this blogspot post, but there was a person who analyzed poems in depth, and they were able to pull a LITANY of things from this poem
I recall the way Percy plays with the long/short vowels was iambic, or something, but it goes off-beat at certain parts to emphasize certain emotions (as most good poems do). I forget exactly how. But it also talked at length about the ambiguity in certain phrases, like “the hand that mocked” being either the sculptor or someone else, and the “heart that fed” was a really interesting and abstract line
I hate how much I forgot and the fact that I can’t find that post anymore, it was REALLY deep and I suck at poetic analysis haha
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u/InvidiousPlay Mar 04 '26
I always took "the heart that fed" to be the heart of the sculptor who nurtured his resentment for Ramses.
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u/chicken-nanban Mar 05 '26
As an artist, I always took those lines to be about the drive to make art.
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
“The artistry of the details captured on the sculptures face show that the person who made it was talented and skillful”
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
(Still talking about the sculptor) their hands mocked them (by not being able in their mind to bring their vision to life exactly as they wanted it) and the heart that fed that passion to capture every nuance.
I’ve had projects like that. I curse that I know my hands can create this how I want, but every time I try, I fall just short of what I expect from myself. Others might say that version is amazing and perfect, but I can see where I just barely messed up something I should have been able to execute flawlessly. But that passionate need to make it as best I can is what feeds me and keeps me alive.
That’s just my 2¢ on that and how that poem has always hit me, though.
Like it’s a story about Ozymandias/Ramses and their great civilization fallen and nigh forgotten, but also about the individual in that civilization, a nobody nameless artist who’s passion and skill is what we see now. Not the mighty works of Ozymandias, the mighty work of a sculptor.
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Mar 04 '26
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u/Exo-Noodle Mar 04 '26
I first read the poem in my British literature class in high school and I liked it. But it was the version used in the Marathon cinematic trailer that made me like it even more
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Mar 04 '26
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u/Puzzleheaded_Smoke77 Mar 04 '26
And someone 150 years from now will dig up the phone and use off the shelf quantum computers and see your pics of food and cats be in awe of the moments that you though were worth capturing. Look an American short hair they are so cute to bad we lost them all in 2078 in the great feline purge or wow look at that salmon it so pretty and editable to its crazy how pink it was before they all turn neon yellow .
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u/JoinedToPostHere Mar 04 '26
I had to Google when the camera was invented to make sure I wasn't being fooled haha (it was invented in 1816 btw)
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u/AlanJacksonscoochi Mar 04 '26
Shoulda googled oldest pics of sphinx
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u/mk48 Mar 04 '26
Where are you seeing a claim that this is the sphinx? Am I losing my mind?
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u/Carliarnius Mar 04 '26
It's not the sphinx, the sphinx' face looks completely different
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u/K_Linkmaster Mar 04 '26
Do you know anything about what is pictured?
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u/Pain_Monster Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26
The first “photo” was taken in 1816, but it wasn’t with a camera. It was a process using the sun to shine on bitumen that cast a reflection of a farmhouse onto a pewter plate.
Hardly something you could use to snap a photo of Egyptian relics.
In 1839 was the First Practical Camera when Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype, the first publicly announced, commercially viable photographic process.
It would be a while before this became a viable option, but that would be the earliest known date where “snapping a photo” was even possible.
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u/JoinedToPostHere Mar 05 '26
You're right. I read that when I was looking it up. I just had to shorten it to get the point across. If I had said 1839 someone would have said "technically the first photo was in 1816" lol 🤷
Thanks for adding the facts to my comment though.
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u/meinershagenvenancia Mar 04 '26
It is wild to think that for centuries, people probably just walked right over these masterpieces thinking they were just particularly symmetrical rocks.
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Mar 04 '26
Nobody thought that, there was a continuous chain of people living there since ancient times, nobody would think those weren’t man made.
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u/nifty-necromancer Mar 04 '26
What? Ancient humans weren’t stupid, our brains have been the same for tens of thousands of years.
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u/TexasGriff1959 Mar 04 '26
You can find some immense (Gigabyte plus) images of the Sphinx on WikiImages. Stuff from this time period with incredible, almost staggering levels of detail.
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u/TapestryMobile Mar 04 '26
Its nothing at all to do with the Sphinx.
Its nothing at all to do with that time period. Its nineteenth dynasty, literally thousands of years later.
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u/yaffle53 Mar 04 '26
I did the same thing to my dad in 1983 on Blackpool beach. It took him ages to get out.
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u/Ill_Back_284 Mar 04 '26
It was weird you needed to ask, is this the original location or not. They went wild in the 70s deconstructing and moving monuments
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u/tigernet_1994 Mar 04 '26
My name is Ozymandias king of kings. Look on my works and despair.
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u/AdventureUSA Mar 04 '26
I met a traveler from an antique land
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u/InSan1tyWeTrust Mar 04 '26
People will share the same post in a hundred or so years only it will be a picture of Easter Island.
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u/aphel_ion Mar 04 '26
This is AI
Why is the sphinx surrounded by bedrock? Makes no sense.
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u/CoffeeGooner_ Mar 04 '26
We have pictures from 1870 but NOT from Wilt Chamberlains 100 point game
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u/HalfMilkx2 Mar 04 '26
There's a recording of the radio broadcast from the 4th quarter of the game, various newspaper articles that talk about the game that were out the day/week after, and interviews with players from both teams and even coaches I believe.
Go watch JxmyHighroller's latest youtube video.
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u/poopy_poophead Mar 04 '26
Wait .. is that THE sphinx with a complete nose? If so, I wasn't aware that there was a photo of it prior to it being damaged...
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u/CoronaLime Mar 05 '26
Did the local people just like walk by this thing and just not think anything of it?
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u/KlopperSteele Mar 05 '26
Basically no one gave a shit and treated their old culture and innovation like shit. Robbing and looting from it as much as they could. Prime example was and is the mummy trade. You used to be able to go into a bazaar and buy a mummy for like pennies. Only when someone else went i like this and monetary value was associated did it become stealing.
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u/sweaty_middle Mar 05 '26
I wonder what else could still be buried beneath the Egyptian sands...
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u/fastforwardfunction Mar 05 '26
Wow, look how much they treated the monuments before the British preserved and documented everything.
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u/AdWooden2312 Mar 04 '26
Do those giant rocks suggest this was once the sea floor at one point because it sure looks like it to me.
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u/SpaceHippoDE Mar 04 '26
I've never been able to wrap my head around how ancient ruins can end up buried so deep.
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u/Sweet-Message1153 Mar 05 '26
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
-Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley
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u/No_Divide637 Mar 06 '26
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: »Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert … Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: ›My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!‹ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.«
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
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u/scout1892 Mar 04 '26
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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u/ReputationLiving3387 Mar 04 '26
It’s always so fascinating to see old ruins in extremely old photos or paintings