What do you think about this?
Deep inside the temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt, in a small crypt beneath the main floor, there is a carving that has launched a thousand arguments. On the wall, a figure holds what looks startlingly like a giant lightbulb. A long bulb shape encloses a wavy serpent, supported by a pillar, with a cable running back to a box. To modern eyes it looks almost exactly like an electric lamp with its filament glowing inside.
For decades, writers outside the academic world have pointed to it as proof that the ancient Egyptians understood electricity, that they lit their tombs with lamps rather than torches, which would explain why archaeologists find no soot on many deep chamber ceilings.
Egyptologists have a very different reading, and a well grounded one. Every element in the scene, they say, is standard Egyptian religious symbolism. The bulb is a lotus flower, from which a serpent rises, a familiar image of creation and the first sunrise. The pillar is a djed, a symbol of stability, and the whole panel is covered in hieroglyphs that name exactly what is being shown. Nothing about it mentions light or power.
What if the truth is that we are simply seeing a wall about gods and creation through the eyes of an electric age, reading our own inventions into a story that was never about them?
An ancient technology lost to history, or a sacred myth we no longer know how to read? What do you think the Dendera carving actually shows?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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