Though many of lifes great mysteries remain unsolved, there are
some lesser known ones that also have stumped researchers for
centuries. While grand enigmas such as Egypts great pyramids,
Stonehenge, the Shroud of Turin and the downfall of Rome have
garnered widespread interest, here are some perennial riddles that
remain just as puzzling. Tuan C. Nguyen
Rongorongo
Considered the other Easter Island mystery, Rongorongo is the
hieroglyphic script used by the regions early inhabitants. While
no other neighboring oceanic people possessed a written language,
Rongorongo appeared mysteriously in the 1700s. The language was
lost thoughalong with the best hopes for deciphering itafter
early European colonizers banned it because of its ties to the
islanders pagan roots.
Lost City of Helike
Greek writer Pausanias gave an account of how, in one night, a
crushing earthquake destroyed the city of Helike, followed by a
massive tsunami that swept away what remained of the
once-flourishing metropolis. The Achaean league capital was a
worship center devoted to earth shaker and God of the sea,
Poseidon. No trace of the legendary society existed outside of
ancient Greek texts until 1861 when an archeologist found Helike
loota bronze coin with the unmistakable head of Poseidon. In 2001,
a pair of archeologists located the ruins of Helike beneath mud and
gravel and is currently trying to uncover the rise and demise of
what some consider the real Atlantis.
The Bog Bodies
Even CSIs best efforts wouldnt go very far in solving the mystery
of the bog bodies. So far, there have been hundreds of corpses,
mostly from the iron age, discovered buried around the northern
wetlands of Europe. Many of these amazingly well-preserved bodies,
some dating back 2,000 years back, exhibit tell-tale signs of
torture and medieval foul play. Such gruesome clues have some
researchers suspecting that they were victims of an ancient
practice of ritual sacrifice.
Fall of the Minoans
While many historians have figuring out what caused the collapse of
the Roman Empire pretty high up on their to-do lists, the fall of
the Minoan empire has proved just as puzzling. Three and a half
millenniums ago, life on the island of Cretewhich boasted a
mythical King and his man-eating beastwas disrupted by a volcanic
eruption at neighboring Thera Island. Clay tablets found by
archeologists showed that instead of folding, Minoans carried on
for another 50 years before finally packing it in. Theories of what
finally did them in range from subsequent volcanic ash cover that
devastated harvests to a weakened society left vulnerable to an
eventual Greek takeover.
The Carnac Stones
If erecting Stonehenge seemed to have been a tremendous groan,
think about how backbreaking it must have been for builders of the
Carnac stones. On the coast of Brittany in northeastern France, are
over 3,000 megalithic standing stones arranged in perfect lines and
spread out over 12 kilometers. The local myth about the stones is
that they were all part of a Roman Legion that the wizard Merlin
turned into stone. A more rational stab at an explanation, by a
researcher who studied the stones for over 30 years, purported that
the stones are likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The
identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.[/b]
