Posted on 04/10/2013 9:34:04 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Rising nearly 32 feet (10 meters) high, it has a diameter of about 230 feet (70 meters). To put that in perspective, the outer stone circle of Stonehenge has a diameter just half that with its tallest stones not reaching that height.
It appears to be a giant cairn, rocks piled on top of each other. Structures like this are known from elsewhere in the world and are sometimes used to mark burials. Researchers do not know if the newly discovered structure was used for this purpose.
They say it is definitely human-made and probably was built on land, only later to be covered by the Sea of Galilee as the water level rose. "The shape and composition of the submerged structure does not resemble any natural feature. We therefore conclude that it is man-made and might be termed a cairn," the researchers write.
Researcher Yitzhak Paz, of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ben-Gurion University, believes it could date back more than 4,000 years. "The more logical possibility is that it belongs to the third millennium B.C., because there are other megalithic phenomena (from that time) that are found close by," Paz told LiveScience in an interview, noting that those sites are associated with fortified settlements.
The researchers list several examples of megalithic structures found close to the Sea of Galilee that are more than 4,000 years-old. One example is the monumental site of Khirbet Beteiha, located some 19 miles (30 kilometers) north-east of the submerged stone structure, the researchers write. It "comprises three concentric stone circles, the largest of which is 56 m (184 feet) in diameter."
ping
BUMP
How big are the individual rocks? It might just be a pile of old ballast from a boatbuilder’s facility near the shore.
Star-aquagate
Pile of ballast
“the structure is made of basalt boulders up to 1 m (3.2 feet) long with no apparent construction pattern,”
http://rt.com/news/galilee-israel-underwater-structure-642/
Wait.....sea levels rose over four thousand years ago? How is that possible, when they didn't have SUVs to pump extra CO2 into the atmosphere?
Or did they???
Isn’t that why they burned the Bush?
If it was a boatyard, particularly one used for repair or rebuilding older boats, they’d probably have a process for every repair job. As each boat came in, it would be one team’s job to remove all the old ballast, and they’d probably have their own “spot” for doing it, near the area of the beach where the boats were pulled out of the water (so they didn’t have to move the now very-bouyant and difficult to control hull all that far to get it beached), but not where it would be a hazard to boats being re-launched.
I don't think ISO 9000 is that old :-) The process would be controlled by a specific master that happened to do the work, and those masters would be changing as lifespans back then were not that great.
The monument, which is made off large boulders, has the shape of a cone and an estimated weight of around 60,000 tons.
I doubt they needed much ballast for the boats that they were building. Those would be probably Egyptian type boats made from reed and other local stuff. Not particularly Titanic-like. So let's say each boat had 100 kg of ballast in it. 60,000 tons then yields 600,000 boats. That's probably more than the total number of boats built since Noah's time anywhere on Earth.
The local economy wouldn't need that many boats, so if we assume that they were indeed built there it had to take centuries, if not millennia. However why would the dumping location be so well preserved across all that time and hundreds of generations of boat builders? They had no GPS to know where to dump stones, and they had no particularly good reason to do it at one point. If you have a facility on shore then you'd be dumping ballast in an arc, not at a single point - that would have to be triangulated from onshore markers. It's a lot of work. Also people are not stupid; they would have started dumping rocks as close to the shore as possible, and only after a few close calls with incoming boats they would grudgingly move the dumping point a bit farther - but not before they used up the entire arc. On top of that, why would you go out of your way to create an artificial reef that *is* a danger for heavier boats? The top of the mound is only 5 feet below the surface. I'd buy it if it was done by an apprentice, in one afternoon and without oversight - an impossibility, of course.
There is yet another issue. The mound is built out of "basalt boulders up to 1 m (3.2 feet) long." Ok, take one of these and put it into a reed boat. What will happen? It will break the bottom of the boat because it is too dense - and too large anyway. If you want a ballast, you'd use gravel that is sewn into bags and spread along the bottom, to even the pressure out.
But there is yet another issue. Why would a shipbuilder discard the ballast? Ballast is used in new boats too. If you unload it and sink, where do you get a new one? I guess there are stones around, but why would you go for miles to nearest hills, using expensive equines and a cart, and get stone if you can reuse the old one that sits right next to the boat, just where you left it? Or maybe the boat is sitting on ballast - you need to raise it to work on it. I cannot imagine an irrational hatred toward perfectly peaceful blocks of stone, to the extent that thousands of shipbuilders took time to cart them away in boats and sink them over one very specific place.
The pointy tip of the mound indicates that last stones were thrown very accurately and with good grouping. This is hard to do from a boat, looking into a dark water. This means that the mound was assembled on land, where the tip was clearly visible to anyone - but only the strongest could climb up there and deposit the load. Weaker workers (or believers?) would leave the stones pretty far from the tip. The profile of the mound even shows from what direction the delivery was occurring (from the right, in the plane of the drawing.) The opposite end was formed by the stones that fell over all by themselves because it is too steep for climbing. The offset of the tip shows that contributors were coming from at least 270° of the circle.
I would be thinking it’s there to cover over something you don’t want dug up.
Comprises three concentric stone circles, the largest of which is 56 m (184 feet) in diameter. 32 feet (10 meters) high.
With all due respect to cultural conservatives...
Ballast?
Do not understand why this is so difficult.
Jesus knew no one can walk on water so he built a path of floating basalt rocks to walk on. When finished he piled them in a neat stack to be available for the next bad storm.
Easy.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks BenLurkin. |
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I was hoping that the discussion was just injecting some humor, not too sure now. :’)
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