What do you think about this?
In 1936, a German archaeologist named Wilhelm Konig was working at a museum in Baghdad when he found something in the basement collection that did not belong to any catalogued period of Mesopotamian history.
It was a clay jar, about five inches tall, sealed with bitumen. Inside the jar was a hollow copper cylinder. Inside the cylinder was an iron rod, suspended so it never touched the copper walls. Traces of acidic residue, possibly vinegar or wine, lined the inside of the jar.
Drop an acid into that arrangement and you have a galvanic cell. A battery. The same basic design Alessandro Volta is credited with inventing in 1800, almost two thousand years later.
The jar was dated to the Parthian period, somewhere between 250 BC and 224 AD.
When the design was reconstructed by modern engineers, including at MIT and on multiple television programs, it produced between half a volt and a full volt. Enough to electroplate small objects in gold or silver. Some researchers have pointed out that ancient Iraqi silversmiths produced gilded pieces that look, under a microscope, exactly like electroplated work.
Mainstream archaeologists have proposed it was a scroll storage vessel. They have not, in ninety years, explained the copper cylinder, the suspended iron rod, the bitumen seal, or the acid traces.
The original jar was looted from the Baghdad Museum in the chaos of 2003 and has never been recovered.
What if a working battery existed in the ancient Near East two thousand years before our textbooks say it did, and the knowledge of how to make it was simply lost?
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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