A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160812-the-giant-pyramid-hidden-inside-a-mountain

by Cozumel • 10 years ago

176 52 10 years ago

goldscott• 10 years ago

I 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/Comparis...

Note that Cholula has the largest base, but isn't the tallest.

jjeaff• 10 years ago

I 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• 10 years ago

The 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?

Someone2• 10 years ago

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):

"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• 10 years 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

Houshalter• 10 years ago

Tangent: 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• 10 years ago

They aren't interactive, but since their XML can be directly embedded in an HTML document they can be manipulated through the DOM.

btbuildem• 10 years ago

CSS styles

pierrec• 10 years ago

SVGs 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• 10 years ago

It'a amazing that more than half of those are in the BC era.

ap3• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Very, very common for conquering people to build religious buildings on the religious ruins of the vanquished.

malkia• 10 years ago

Or converted, like Hagia Sophia and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

bpodgursky• 10 years ago

While 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• 10 years ago

Similar thing happened in Rome: the marble from the Colleseum was stripped and used to build St Peters.

toyg• 10 years ago

That 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.

jomamaxx3• 10 years ago

"Similar thing happened in Rome: the marble from the Coliseum was stripped and used to build St Peters."

Oh please - this is really out of context.

'The Coliseum' was a place of mass murder, moreover, at the time that any materials may have been salvaged or 're-purposed' nobody in the world was concerned about the historical significance of much at all.

hackaflocka• 10 years ago

I 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• 10 years ago

No not mass. Volume and base area.

b34r• 10 years ago

I 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• 10 years ago

... it’s the largest pyramid on the planet...

There seem to be the larger one in Europe - Bosnia: http://piramidasunca.ba

roywiggins2• 10 years ago

The claims are... controversial, to say the least, and probably bunk.

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• 10 years ago

Because we aren't receiving enough cosmic energy from the center of the solar system.

ebcode• 10 years ago

ad hominem. don't shoot the messenger...

douche• 10 years ago

There 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-...

DAddYE• 10 years ago

I watched the tunnels found recently under it in "Expedition Unknown - Lost Mexican City". They're stunning!

scirocco• 10 years ago

This 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• 10 years ago

I 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• 10 years ago

Do you mean Huaca Pucllana by any chance?

jandrese• 10 years ago

Even 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• 10 years ago

Which 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• 10 years 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.

overcast2• 10 years ago

In three hours?

duaneb2• 10 years ago

It would absolutely shock me if they didn't exceed 1k/hr at times. Nobody really did what Ghengis did again, thank god.

Zelphyr• 10 years ago

Maybe their murders went to 11?

ekianjo• 10 years ago

Its not the largest man made monument. Kofun are bigger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun

jamilaliahmed• 10 years ago

This is some new and useful info. All my life i thought Egypt had the largest Pyramid.

quantumhobbit• 10 years ago

The Egyptian ones are still the tallest. This one has a wider base.

impe83• 10 years ago

Oh got it, thanks for the clarification!

whamlastxmas• 10 years ago

It's depressing when even the BBC is full of click bait and contentless garbage: http://i.imgur.com/n482Pze.png

Two or maybe three are fine. The rest is total shit, though.

A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain

Related Stories