Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries

site has produced such a huge amount of excavated material the exact dates of its habitation are known. The temple was founded in August A.D. 28 and was destroyed in the May A.D. 363 earthquake that brought down many of the city's buildings.
The largest monument in Petra and one of the most striking is El-Deir (the Monastery), acquiring the name from its use as a church during the Byzantine period (c. A.D. 330-A.D.1453). The spectacularly situated structure, high up on the mountain, is 164 feet wide and 148 feet high, with its great doorway measuring around 26 feet in height. The structure is carved, as with the Treasury, into the side of a cliff face. In fact, the Monastery is similar to a larger, rougher, weatherbeaten version of the more famous Petra monument. Archaeologists believe that construction of El-Deir began during the reign of Nabatean king Rabel II (A.D. 76-106), but was never completed.
Petra was brought back to the center of public attention in 1989 with the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, starring Harrison Ford. In the film, it served as a secret temple hidden for hundreds of years, and the place where Harrison Ford finally locates the Holy Grail. It was in the news again in 2005, when the Dalai
Lama led a host of Nobel Prize winners who, together with actor Richard Gere, organized a two-day conference at the rose red city entitled "A World in Danger." The fortunately excellent state of preservation of much of the ancient city can be explained by the fact that most of its structures have been carved out of solid rock. However, as with many ancient monuments, the sandstone buildings at Petra are in constant danger from excessive tourism, and the free-standing buildings in particular are suffering from salt, water, and wind erosion. On December 6, 1985, Petra was recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and for the past few years conservationists have been at work on the monument filling in the holes and cracks in the stone with a specially designed mixture, as close as possible to the original sandstone of the 2,000-year-old plus structures. Hopefully, one of the world's most beautiful and spectacular ruined cities will be around for at least another 2,000 years.
© Thanassis Vembos.
The Monastery at Petra.

the Silbury Hill Enigma
Photograph by the author.
Silbury Hill, barely reaching the height of the surrounding hills.
Lying low in the Kennet valley in Wiltshire, southern England, looms the mysterious Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound in Europe and one of the biggest in the world. The site stands amid the prehistoric sacred landscape surrounding the present day village of Avebury, and contains a complex of Neolithic monuments, including an enormous henge (a roughly circular flat area enclosed by a boundary earthwork), stone circles, stone alignments, and burial chambers. The imposing earthwork structure of Silbury Hill stands at 128 feet high, its flattened top is 98 feet across, and its diameter at the base is 547 feet. The
huge 125 foot wide ditch that surrounds Silbury was the source of much of the material which makes up the mound, an amazing 8,756,880 cubic feet of chalk and soil. It has been estimated that construction of the monument would have taken the efforts of 1,500 to 2,000 men working for a year, 300 to 400 men working for more than five years, or 60 to 80 men working for more than 25 years. In all, an estimated 4 to 6 million man hours, though some have suggested a figure as high as 18 million hours. Because of its dimensions, Silbury has often been compared with the Great Pyramid in Egypt, which is roughly contemporary with the huge English earthwork. According to a radiocarbon date recently obtained from an antler pick fragment, Silbury probably achieved its final form between 2490 B.C. and 2340 B.C. But what was the purpose of such a massive undertaking of organization and manpower?
There is at present no consensus of opinion amongst archaeologists as to how many building phases there were at the huge earthwork at Silbury, though we know its builders used tools of stone, bone, wood, and antler in its construction. The late Richard Atkinson, who excavated the mound in the late 1960s, hypothesized three separate phases. In the first of Atkinson's phases (Silbury I), dated to around 2700 B.C., the earthwork consisted of a low gravel-built mound covered in alternating layers of chalk rubble and turf, around 18 feet high and about 115 feet across. Atkinson believed that Silbury II was begun about 200 years later, and consisted of a much larger mound constructed over the top of Silbury I. In this phase, the earthwork had a diameter at its base of about 246 feet, with a height of 66 feet. Silbury III was the hill's final form, basically the earthwork we see today. Atkinson thought that the structure of Silbury III had been built up in tiers of chalk, only the upper two of which are now visible on the monument. Each of these horizontal steps was inclined inwards at an angle of 60 degrees, to provide the monument with stability; the tiers were then filled in with soil, probably from the ditch at the base of the mound. Despite Atkinson's three-phase theory, the latest evidence from surveys of parts of Silbury has revealed the possibility of
there being only one construction phase at the site. Only a complete survey of the whole monument will decide this issue.
There have been three main excavations undertaken at Silbury Hill in an attempt to fathom its mystery. The first of these was carried out by the Duke of Northumberland in 1776, who hired a team of Cornish miners to dig down from the top of the mound. However, they found nothing of note, and as the workers did not fill in the shaft properly after investigations were finished, their excavation led ultimately to the