Nexus - 0904 - New Times Magazine-pages

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ANCIENT RELIEF MAP FOUND ON STONE SLAB IN THE URALS According to the Russian news agency Pravda, scientists at BashkirState University in the southern Ural Mountains are discussing their find-ings concerning a mysterious stone slabwhich has a detailed relief map etchedinto it. They have been studying the slabsince they carted it away from the villageof Chandar, near Ufa, in July 1999. Prof. Alexandr Chuvyrov, who heads the specialist team of cartographers, geol-ogists, physicists and chemists, believesthey have found proof of the existence ofan ancient, highly developed civilisa-tion—evidence that defies conventionalnotions of human history. For a start, the relief map was not made manually by an ancient stonecutting tool;as X-ray analysis revealed, it was machinedwith precision tools. It also shows a viewthat could only have been plotted by aerialsurvey. The dimensions of the slab were deter- mined once it was dug out of the backyardof a village house: 148 cm x 106 cm x 16cm. Once they cleaned it back at the lab,the scientists realised they had uncovered a3D relief map (or plan) of the Ufa regionon a scale of 1:1.1 kilometres. Apart from showing identifiable features such as rivers and canyons, it also depictscivil engineering and irrigation works including two 500-metre-wide channel sys-tems, with a total length of about 12,000kilometres, and 12 dams, each 300–500metres wide, approx. 10 km long and 3 kmdeep, which would have required the shift- ing of over a quadrillion cubic metres of earth to construct. The slab consists ofthree layers: a 14-cm-thick base made ofhard dolomite, a second layer of diopsideglass of a composition unknown to modernscience, and a 2-mm-thick top layer of cal-cium porcelain to protect the map fromimpact. To try to determine the age of the map, the scientists carried out radiocarbon analy-sis and scanned the layers with a uraniumchronometer, but the results were inconclu-sive. At first the scientists thought the findmight be about 3,000 years old, but then they discovered two shells embedded in theslab, from shellfish species that existed 500and 120 million years ago—though this isno confirmation that the map is actuallythat ancient. The slab also contains inscriptions writ- ten in an unknown hieroglyphic-syllabiclanguage. The scientists originallythought the script might be some form ofOld Chinese, because in 1995 Prof.Chuvyrov was investigating the writingsleft by ancient Chinese people duringpossible migrations to Siberia and theUrals, but their archival searches dis-proved this notion and the script remainsundeciphered. The scientists are speculating that the slab is only a fragment of a much largermap that they estimate to have been 340 x 340 metres in size and that might possiblyhave depicted the entire planet's surface.They hypothesise that it was most likelysituated in the Sokolinaya Mountain gorgebut was broken up in the last glacial epoch,the slabs eventually being deposited inChandar and elsewhere in the Ufa region.The scientists are continuing their searchfor more slabs and fragments, which couldwell number in their hundreds. (Source: Pravda website, April 30, 2002,http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/04/30/28149.html) JUNE – JULY 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com NEXUS • 67The slab also contains inscriptions written in an unknown hieroglyphic- syllabic language.