Mankind’s Cradle of Civilisation Found in Java?

Mankind’s Cradle of Civilisation Found in Java?

February 3, 2013 By davidjones
By FRANK JOSEPH—

“Men fear time,” the old saying used to go, “but time fears the Sphinx.” That famous statue and Egypt’s Great Pyramid before which it has reclined for thousands of years have been long regarded as the most ancient monumental structures on Earth. Indeed, their late 20th century reappraisals indicated that they were even older than suspected.

Beginning in 1974, a medical physicist and colleague of Albert Einstein, Kurt Mendelssohn, showed that the Great Pyramid was not the 2560 BCE tomb of some vainglorious king described by mainstream scholars.1 Instead, the “Mountain of Ra” was raised nearly six centuries earlier, at the very outset of Pharaonic Civilisation, as a massive public works project to unify the numerous, divisive tribes of the Nile Delta in the common cause of its construction.

So too, the Great Sphinx – roughly contemporaneous, according to Egyptologists, with the Great Pyramid – has been back-dated to at least 5000 BCE – two millennia before the first Egyptian dynasty – by an American geologist at Boston University. During the early 1990s, Robert M. Schoch found that erosion on the Sphinx was not caused by the effects of wind-driven sand, as consensus opinion held, but by moving water, when conditions at the Nile Valley were far more rainy, long prior to the 26th century BCE.2

As recently as 2009, these extreme chronological disclosures were radically eclipsed by radiocarbon testing of a monumental ceremonial centre in southern Turkey. Its T-shaped pillars, arranged in concentric, stone circles emblazoned with anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and geometric bas-relief images, pushed the start of civilisation back to eleven thousand years ago. But now, even Gobekli Tepe’s primacy has been overtaken by the announcement last autumn of a much larger megalithic complex, half a world away from Anatolia, two thousand or more years older.

The paradigm-shattering ruins were found in western Java, fifty kilometres southwest of Cianjur, a city with more than two million residents; Jakarta lies one hundred twenty kilometres to the northwest. A half-hour drive over asphalt and unpaved roads to the village of Karyamukti passes through mountainous landscape dotted with rice paddies and farms flourishing in the volcanic soil with chillies, peanuts, pineapple and corn, then skirts an immense tea plantation. At Mount Padang, hardy visitors need about twenty minutes to climb some 370 stone steps, rising at almost a forty-degree angle, ninety-five metres to the summit, which is crowned with the largest megalithic site in southeastern Asia. It encompasses more than twenty-five hectares, including nine hundred square metres of five, rectangular, stone courtyards ascending northwest to southeast, precisely laid out on a series of landscaped terraces, and neatly organised into low walls, inner partitions, and outward gateways, all of them connected by flights of stairs.

Within and without the enclosures are dozens of standing monoliths, but many more lie scattered about. The entire complex comprises an estimated 3,703,700 black, andesite blocks ranging from one to two metres in length, and formed by geological processes into polygonal structures of five-, six- or eight-sided columns. (Andesite is an extrusive, igneous rock, a type of basalt formed by volcanic action.) Average dimensions for the columns are 0.3-by-0.3-by-1.5 metres. These smooth-sided blocks weigh from ninety to six hundred kilograms, with an average, individual weight of about three hundred kilograms. In other words, the site’s prehistoric workers transported approximately 1,111,110,000 kilograms (1,224,790 short tons) of building materials 885 metres above sea level, up the precipitous slopes of Mount Padang. Added to their burden was a non-local source for their andesite, which had to be brought in from some distant quarry unknown to academic scholars.

Archaeologists were further surprised to find traces of a kind of adhesive, glue or perhaps cement that bound some of the top courses of the walls. Beneath, investigators were perplexed by the presence of several layers of sand that had been deliberately incorporated into the original stonework by the prehistoric engineers, perhaps allowing the blocks to move and slide against each other with the motion of seismic disturbances, instead of rigidly resisting such geologic upheavals and breaking under tension. Here was possible evidence for ancient earthquake-proof construction. Java is notorious for its tectonic violence, which claimed the lives of about eighty victims as recently as 2 September 2009. But it seemed utterly inconceivable that some pre-industrial people living in a remote, Indonesian backwater could have actually applied a form of technology our modern world has only recently begun to grasp.

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[link to www.newdawnmagazine.com]