Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In the far south of Egypt, in one of the driest and most desolate stretches of the Sahara, there lies a place where a great mystery is written in stone across the empty sand. It is called Nabta Playa, and it is one of the oldest known monuments to the human study of the heavens anywhere on earth. Here, some seven thousand years ago and more — a thousand years and more before the first stones of Stonehenge were raised, long before the pharaohs built their pyramids — a people living in what was then a green and watered land set up rings and rows of standing stones aligned to the sun and, it seems, to the stars. They were not the builders of a great civilization with cities and writing. They were nomadic herders of cattle, wanderers of the savanna. And yet they raised a monument of astronomical knowledge so early and so sophisticated that its very existence forces us to reconsider how ancient the human quest to read the sky truly is. How and why these desert herders came to build a star-...

Just across the river from where the modern city of St. Louis now stands, in the fertile bottomlands of the Mississippi, there once rose the greatest city that ever existed in North America north of Mexico. It was called, by us, Cahokia — for we do not know the name its own builders gave it. At its height, some nine hundred years ago, it was a metropolis of many thousands of people, larger in its day than London, a sprawling sacred city of enormous earthen pyramids, vast public plazas, and great timber monuments aligned to the movements of the sun. It was the capital of a powerful and sophisticated civilization, the beating heart of a culture that spread its influence across much of the continent. And then, over the course of a century or two, it emptied. Its people abandoned the great mounds and drifted away, the city fell silent, and by the time European explorers arrived, no one remained who could tell them who had built the giant pyramids or why they had been forsaken. The rise an...

In the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, on a site the ancients called Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, there stand the ruins of one of the most staggering temple complexes of the old world. Great Roman temples once rose here in honor of Jupiter and other gods, their soaring columns among the largest ever raised. But it is not the columns, magnificent as they are, that have made Baalbek a byword for mystery. It is the stones beneath them — and above all a handful of colossal cut blocks whose sheer, almost incomprehensible size has baffled engineers, archaeologists, and travelers for centuries. Buried in the foundations of the temple platform, and lying still in the ancient quarry nearby, are some of the largest building blocks ever shaped by human hands: monoliths weighing hundreds and even upward of a thousand tons apiece. How they were cut, moved, and, in some cases, lifted into place high off the ground, remains a genuine and unresolved puzzle, and it has made the great stones of Baalbek on...

On a windswept ridge in southeastern Turkey, overlooking a vast and ancient plain, there rises a low hill that the local people once knew simply as the hill with a navel. Beneath its surface lay something that no one suspected and that, when it was finally uncovered, forced the whole story of human civilization to be rewritten. Buried in that hill were rings of enormous carved stone pillars — great T-shaped megaliths, some of them taller than a person and weighing many tons, arranged in circles and decorated with vivid reliefs of wild and dangerous animals. This was a monument of astonishing sophistication. And it was old — almost unbelievably old. Göbekli Tepe was raised some eleven or twelve thousand years ago, before the invention of writing, before the wheel, before metal, before pottery, and, most staggering of all, before the coming of agriculture itself. It was built by hunter-gatherers, by people with no farms and no cities and no domesticated animals, and it is the oldest kno...

In the high desert country of the American Southwest, tucked into the sheltering hollows of great sandstone cliffs, stand some of the most breathtaking ruins in all of North America. They are entire towns built into the rock — multistoried dwellings of mortared stone, hundreds of rooms deep, with towers and ceremonial chambers, clinging to the walls of the canyons beneath overhanging cliffs. The people who built them, the Ancestral Puebloans, once called the Anasazi, raised a sophisticated civilization across this land over many centuries, mastering the desert, tracking the movements of the sun and stars, and constructing works of astonishing scale and beauty. And then, toward the end of the thirteenth century, within the span of a generation or two, they left. They abandoned the great cliff cities, walked away from the homes their ancestors had built over hundreds of years, and moved on, leaving the stone towns empty beneath the cliffs. Why they went, and why so suddenly and so compl...

On the loneliest inhabited island on earth — a speck of volcanic rock in the vast emptiness of the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the nearest mainland — a people carved a system of writing so mysterious that no one alive can read a word of it. The island is Rapa Nui, which the outside world came to call Easter Island, famous for its great stone heads gazing out over the sea. But among its deepest riddles is a set of wooden tablets and objects covered in tiny, intricate glyphs: rows of birds, fish, plants, human and part-human figures, and abstract signs, carved with astonishing care into the hard wood. This script is called rongorongo, and it is one of the very few independently invented writing systems in the whole history of humankind. It is also, tragically, undeciphered. The knowledge of how to read it died with the people who made it, and despite more than a century and a half of effort, the tablets keep their meaning locked away, whispering in a voice no one can any long...

On the arid Paracas peninsula of southern Peru, where the desert runs down to meet the cold Pacific, a Peruvian archaeologist named Julio Tello made an astonishing discovery in the 1920s. Beneath the parched ground he uncovered a great necropolis, an ancient cemetery holding hundreds of mummified bodies wrapped in some of the most magnificent woven textiles the ancient world ever produced. But it was not the burials or even the exquisite cloth that has kept the name of Paracas alive in the imagination of the world. It was the skulls. Among the dead were individuals whose heads were shaped like nothing in ordinary human experience — long, narrow, and swept dramatically backward into a great tapering cone, as though the skull itself had been drawn out and stretched toward the sky. These are the famous elongated skulls of Paracas, and for a century they have provoked wonder, argument, and a persistent whisper that they might be something other than entirely human. A People of the Desert...

In the spring of 1901, a team of sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera decided to try their luck in the deep water below. What they found on the seabed was the wreck of an ancient ship, a Roman-era vessel that had gone down some two thousand years before, laden with treasures it had been carrying across the Mediterranean: bronze and marble statues, glassware, coins, and jewelry. The divers hauled up a fortune in classical art, and the museum in Athens set to cataloguing it. Amid the marble limbs and corroded bronzes, someone noticed an unremarkable lump of calcified rock and green metal, about the size of a small book, that had split open to reveal what looked impossibly like a gear wheel. It was set aside as a curiosity. It would turn out to be the single most astonishing object ever recovered from the ancient world — a device so advanced that its very existence forced historians to rewrite what they believed the ancients could do. A Machine ...

In the far west of China lies the Taklamakan, one of the most pitiless deserts on earth — a vast basin of shifting sand ringed by mountains, whose very name is said to warn that those who enter do not come out. And yet buried in that killing sand, for thousands of years, lay a population of the dead so strange that their discovery overturned everything scholars thought they knew about the ancient history of the region. They are the Tarim mummies: hundreds of naturally preserved bodies, some of them more than three or four thousand years old, whose faces, hair, and clothing survived the ages so perfectly that they seem less like ancient corpses than like sleepers who might wake. And the great shock of them, the thing that has provoked argument for over a century, is that many of these bodies do not look like the people one would expect to find in the heart of Asia. They had fair or reddish hair, long noses, deep-set eyes, and features that strike many observers as European. In the midd...

High in the Indian Himalayas, more than sixteen thousand feet above the sea, in a lonely bowl of rock and ice where no one lives and few have any reason to go, there lies a small, shallow glacial lake called Roopkund. For most of the year it is frozen and buried under snow. But when the brief mountain summer thaws its surface and clears the ice from its shores, the lake gives up a spectacle that has horrified and baffled every traveler who has come upon it. Scattered across its bed and heaped along its banks are human bones — hundreds upon hundreds of them. Skulls, ribs, thigh bones, whole skeletons, along with scraps of hair, leather, and preserved flesh, lie exposed in the thin cold air. By most estimates the remains of somewhere between three hundred and six hundred people rest in and around this one tiny alpine pool. It is known, with grim simplicity, as Skeleton Lake. A Discovery in Wartime The bones had long been known to the shepherds and pilgrims of the region, but the wider...