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A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain
- goldscott 10y agoI was here back in February. You can walk through some of the excavated tunnels, but most are closed off. Wikipedia has a good image showing the sizes of different pyramids compared: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparison_of_pyramids.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparis... Note that Cholula has the largest base, but isn't the tallest.
- jjeaff 10y agoI wish that image included La Danta at El Mirador in Guatemala. It is possibly the 2nd largest by volume after the one in Cholula. Although because neither are excavated, there seems to be disagreement on which is larger.
- erelde 10y agoThe Transamerica, the Shard, and the Ryugyong are considered pyramids? Is there a common definition those buildings fullfill? Or are they on the graph for scale?
- Someone 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid: "A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis)[1][2] is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_(geometry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_(geometry): "In geometry, a pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. [...] When unspecified, a pyramid is _usually_ assumed to be a regular square pyramid" Note the _usually_.
- jackgavigan 10y ago> The Transamerica, the Shard, and the Ryugyong are considered pyramids? If you shrink a side elevation of the Shard to 10% of its actual height, it looks like an eight-storey tall pyramid: http://imgur.com/a/Vslkl http://imgur.com/a/Vslkl
- Houshalter 10y agoTangent: that's really cool that wikipedia has interactive graphics and not just static images. In fact, and maybe I'm stupid, but I had no idea that svgs could be interactive until this moment. I thought they were just a vector image format.
- adrusi 10y agoThey aren't interactive, but since their XML can be directly embedded in an HTML document they can be manipulated through the DOM.
- CydeWeys 10y agoIt is interactive. Hovering over different pyramids fills in the shape of just that pyramid, and you can interact with any of them by clicking on it to bring you to the Wikipedia article on it. I too didn't realize that this was possible in SVGs. It's awesome.
- smackmybishop 10y agoIt's just CSS.
- btbuildem 10y agoCSS styles
- pierrec 10y agoSVGs can contain CSS and Javascript, and even without that, you can make all kinds of animations completely in SVG markup, using SVG-SMIL. I'm just saying this as trivia, and emphatically do not recommend that you go down this collapsing rabbit-hole. Ignore that the Wikipedia page currently calls it "a recommended means[1][2][3] of animating SVG-based hypermedia" (lol). It's a complex feature that browsers have been dragging along for years while nobody's using it. Though it seems that Chrome is finally taking the initiative of dropping support, or at least discouraging its use.
- fma 10y agoIt'a amazing that more than half of those are in the BC era.
- ap3 10y ago- the pyramid in Chichen Itzá (mayan) also has a smaller pyramid inside - the spanish continuously built church temples on top of the natives' pyramids. Like a cruel switch of religions. The Mexico City Basilica sits on top of aztec ruins.
- themartorana 10y agoVery, very common for conquering people to build religious buildings on the religious ruins of the vanquished.
- malkia 10y agoOr converted, like Hagia Sophia and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia
- bpodgursky 10y agoWhile that's true in general, > Certainly, by the time Cortéz and his men arrived, it was already a thousand years old and entirely concealed by vegetation.
- snovv_crash 10y agoSimilar thing happened in Rome: the marble from the Colleseum was stripped and used to build St Peters.
- toyg 10y agoThat is just about reusing materials, something very common back when producing such materials was very expensive. Constructing religious buildings on top of pre-existing ones, or repurposing them, is about signalling evolution and domination, about co-opting sensibilities. Christian basilicas in a lot of cases were born as Roman civil buildings, altered to suit the new religion; Hagia Sophia, the Pantheon and a number of other religious buildings were "switched" between religions at various points; and it's fairly common for churches to be built on top of "pagan" shrines. It's like religious festivities "curiously" overlapping pre-existing celebrations, or saints exhibiting characteristics typical of other faiths: one way for new cults to achieve legitimacy is by repurposing existing elements and claiming they fit a grand scheme from the beginning. In a way, both Christianity and Islam do it right from their holy texts.
- hackaflocka 10y agoI just want to clarify that we are talking about mass here. In terms of height, it's much much lower than the pyramids in Giza. When I first heard about that pyramid, I was a little confused because it took me a while to realize this.
- cpncrunch 10y agoNo not mass. Volume and base area.
- b34r 10y agoI think I remember reading a fictional book about this. Something about the pyramid being a necropolis and there being a machine taking you up to a different area that was supposed to be the "heaven" in the duality. Alien God thing with blue skin... I think it was related to the "Excavation" series.
- insulanian 10y ago> ... it’s the largest pyramid on the planet... There seem to be the larger one in Europe - Bosnia: http://piramidasunca.ba http://piramidasunca.ba
- roywiggins 10y agoThe claims are... controversial, to say the least, and probably bunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims "He believes the Mesoamerican pyramids and Egyptian pyramids are built by the same people as the Visočica hill... Osmanagić wishes to excavate in order to "break a cloud of negative energy, allowing the Earth to receive cosmic energy from the centre of the galaxy""
- omarchowdhury 10y agoBecause we aren't receiving enough cosmic energy from the center of the solar system.
- ebcode 10y agoad hominem. don't shoot the messenger...
- roywiggins 10y agoThe wikipedia article contains plenty more attacking the content of his assertions, including this letter: "We, the undersigned professional archaeologists from all parts of Europe, wish to protest strongly at the continuing support by the Bosnian authorities for the so-called "pyramid" project being conducted on hills at and near Visoko. This scheme is a cruel hoax on an unsuspecting public and has no place in the world of genuine science." His gobbeldegook about cosmic energy is a lot more fun and a shorter quote, so I went with that instead.
- douche 10y agoThere seem to be a lot of crackpot ancient civilization theories in Bosnia... This one[1] was on the front page a few months back. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/shaenamontanari/2016/04/18/that-massive-stone-sphere-in-bosnia-is-probably-not-from-a-lost-civilization/#2875f926703b http://www.forbes.com/sites/shaenamontanari/2016/04/18/that-...
- DAddYE 10y agoI watched the tunnels found recently under it in "Expedition Unknown - Lost Mexican City". They're stunning!
- scirocco 10y agoThis is pretty common in Mexico. Go to the Mayan village of Coba on the Yucatan Pensinsula and you will see hundreds of small mountains. What used to be pyramids, are now hills as trees and bushes have grown through them. When I was there some years ago they told me only 5-10% have been restored and made back into pyramids. It's an extremely time-consuming process involving large teams to ensure each brick is put back into the right place. Most times you just see a pile of bricks with no sign of a pyramid structure.
- fennecfoxen 10y agoI was in Lima recently, and there was a ruin right in the nice Miraflores area (with plenty of high-rises) that had been a temple complex of some sort. Where they hadn't excavated, the outer layer of brick had just crumbled to dirt, and looked like nothing special. Apparently part of the temple complex had been leveled and used as a soccer field as recently as the 1980s.
- mafribe 10y agoDo you mean Huaca Pucllana by any chance?
- jandrese 10y agoEven the structures built from stone were dismantled for the materials over the years. It's why Machu Picchu is such an amazing find--the locals didn't know about it and thus didn't tear it apart over the centuries. Compare this to grand sites like Saksaywaman that were picked apart down to the foundation by people looking for building material.
- mason240 10y agoWhich is perfectly fine. They will be there forever and being encased in earth will preserve them. There's no reason to do a roughshod job exposing them.
- kranner 10y ago> Within three hours they had murdered 3,000 people. October 12th 1519 was a bloodbath on an unprecedented scale... Not in global terms. Genghis and his Mongol army allegedly despatched up to hundreds of thousands to over a million people each in campaigns such as in Nishapur, Merv and Urgench, in the 13th century.
- overcast 10y agoIn three hours?
- duaneb 10y agoIt would absolutely shock me if they didn't exceed 1k/hr at times. Nobody really did what Ghengis did again, thank god.
- overcast 10y agoThat's some serious APM.
- duaneb 10y agoA follow up, Ghengis's campaign put multiple cities to the sword, executing everyone not of direct use to the campaign. Death tolls are hard to estimate, but you're looking at anywhere from on the order of tens of thousands to a million people executed at the same time—over the course of hours. Famously, the Tigris ran black and red from ink and blood after the sacking of Baghdad (the ink came from the Grand Library of Baghdad), and the destruction of the Khwarezmia dynasty was particularly bloody. Who knows if we'll ever get accurate numbers, but it's one of the most gruesome period of human history. The institutional hate towards Ghengis only disappeared in the 20th century.
- ekianjo 10y agoIts not the largest man made monument. Kofun are bigger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun
- jamilaliahmed 10y agoThis is some new and useful info. All my life i thought Egypt had the largest Pyramid.
- quantumhobbit 10y agoThe Egyptian ones are still the tallest. This one has a wider base.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- whamlastxmas 10y agoIt's depressing when even the BBC is full of click bait and contentless garbage: http://i.imgur.com/n482Pze.png http://i.imgur.com/n482Pze.png Two or maybe three are fine. The rest is total shit, though.