12 Most Mysterious Ancient Artifacts Scientists Still Can't Explain

Trying to understand an ancient artifact is all part of the discovery process for an expert. It's quite rare for an archaeologist to fully understand an artifact at first sight. They have to research it and find historical context for it first. Sometimes, though, their research gets them nowhere. They're left with a mystery on their hands, and those mysteries sometimes never get solved. Every artifact and discovery you're about to see in this video is a curiosity that's kept its secrets. The MacLeod clan is one of Scotland's most ancient, and its survival may or may not be down to the existence of its legendary fairy flag. Today, you'll find the tatty remnants of the flag on display in Dunvegan Island, on the Scottish island of Skye. The clan's members swear that it has magical properties, offering both healing and protection to anybody who touches it. Even the elders of the clan, though, have no idea how old it is or how it came to be in their possession. Some of them even say it was carried on banners during the Crusades of the Middle Ages and was weaved by the hands of magical fairies. In reality, it was probably weaved by the skilled hands of Syrian craftspeople. A 20th-century analysis of the silk has proven it to be Syrian and suggests that it's about 1,600 years old. That makes the story about the Crusades possible. In fact, it would have been considered ancient even by then. If the MacLeod clan is ever in mortal danger, folklore says that the flag is to be unfurled and waved, at which point, fairies will come and smite the clan's enemies. That's not the sort of behavior we usually associate with them. The Liseborn Gospel Book was already considered a rare and unusual piece of work even before the Liseborn Prayer Wheel was discovered inside it on what appeared to be a blank first page. The book comes from Liseborn Abbey in Warendorf, Germany, which was founded in the year 815. It was initially owned and operated by nuns, but they were expelled by Bishop of Münster in 1131 to make way for a chapter of Benedictine monks. The gospel appears to have been written prior to that, somewhere towards the end of the 10th century. Its author is unknown, although a deacon called Gervardus might have been responsible. The prayer wheel, written in Latin and arranged in a series of concentric circles, was probably added during the early 12th century. Its outermost circle tells us that the order of the diagram teaches us the way to return home, but the meaning of this isn't understood. At the center of the wheel is the word God. Whoever created it didn't include any instructions, and so we have no idea how it was intended to be used. As efforts were evidently made to conceal it, it might even have been considered arcane. On the slopes of Wangsan in South Korea, you'll find an enormous, elaborately decorated 127-ton rock. The rock is called Gwingamseok, but it's better known to the world as Turtle Rock. Legend has it that anybody who rests their hand on the surface of the rock for a few moments will experience a feeling of great relief and immense power. Plenty of people claim to have experienced that feeling, although there's no scientific basis for saying that any such properties exist. The symbols on its surface have never been translated, and might never have been intended to be understood as a message. Local legends say that the rock breathes in something called qi energy from the sunrise, and that the best way to draw power from it is actually to touch it with your forehead rather than your hand. Belief in qi energy is reasonably common in Korea, Japan, and China, and underpinned many ancient Chinese medical beliefs and practices. It was such beliefs that led to the carving of this monument. But the question of who carved it and when is a mystery that's been lost to time. The emperors of ancient Rome were fond of creating enormous stone monuments to their successes so that history would never forget them. One such monument is Trojan's Column, which was erected in Rome after Emperor Trojan's victory in the Dacian Wars somewhere around the year 113. The design inspired the creation of Nelson's Column in London, England. Many of the vanity pieces of Rome's long-dead emperors have been demolished, but this one has stood the test of time. It's just under 100 feet tall and features a 600-foot-long frieze that wraps around the column 23 times. The frieze tells the story of how Trojan's genius led to not one, but two vital military victories for the Romans in Eastern Europe between the years 101 and 106, which decisively tipped the Dacian Wars in the empire's favor. Aside from representations of the emperor himself, the column features over 2,000 human figures and almost as many animals. The Romans wouldn't have had the help of cranes to build the structure, so they must have completed the work by using a succession of platforms to lift the 20 massive 32-ton marble drums that make up the bulk of the monument. Emperor Trojan's statue was removed from the top of the column in 1587 to be replaced with a statue of Saint Peter by order of Pope Sixtus, but it otherwise remains untouched. Liophail stands at the top of the Hill of Tara in Ireland and has been known by many names over the centuries. The most popular is the Stone of Destiny, but it's also known as the Coronation Stone and the Screaming Stone. That's because people believed that the stone would cry out when it was touched by Ireland's rightful king. Nobody knows where the legend comes from, but it's known to have been a commonly held one at the time of the coronation of Mercatorc Mac Erce in the year 500. A mythical, godlike race known as the Tuatha de Danann is credited with bringing the stone to Ireland. The tale of its arrival is told in a series of ancient poems called the Laborgabala Eireann, the authorship of which is unknown. The same texts also say that Cuchulainn was so furious that the stone wouldn't cry out for him that he attacked it with his sword, splitting the rock and ensuring it would never cry out for anybody again. In reality, the Standing Stone was probably erected during the Neolithic era by people who held rituals and ceremonies at the top of the hill. But where's the fun in believing that? When NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe in 1972, it was a big moment for scientists. For the first time, the human race reached out toward the outer planets on a quest for understanding. To commemorate the occasion, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan designed a plaque that was attached to the probe's antenna support struts. The plaque contains basic information about the human race. The design of that plaque is very similar to the designs on these mysterious stones, which were discovered fused together in a cave in Japan, Indonesia, in 1992. Like the plaque, the stone seems to be engraved with a basic map of our solar system, along with depictions of a man and a woman. You might assume that someone copied the design of the plaque onto the stones, but that's impossible. The carvings are several thousand years old. To make things even stranger, the stones apparently have a strong and unexplained magnetic field. It's such a strange discovery that most archaeologists and scientists choose to pretend that it doesn't exist, rather than answer the questions of where it came from and how. Did a time-traveling alien race leave it behind as a joke? Not every challenging or mysterious artifact is ignored by the archaeological community. Some of them find their way into museums, even if we're not really sure what they are. Here's one such object that's currently inside the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion in Crete. It's a single block of solid stone that's been carved by ancient hands into a shape that resembles a giant honeycomb. Look closely, and you'll see that the surface of the honeycomb is covered in small, tube-like shapes. Some of the tubes are so small that they're almost microscopic. Nobody knows how old this artifact is or what it was made for. Nothing like it has ever been found anywhere else in the world. It presumably had some practical or symbolic purpose, but it's impossible even to guess at what that purpose might be. Dating stone artifacts is extremely difficult because of the lack of organic material, so we don't even know how old it is. Could it be nothing more than a decorative object made by an artist to put on display in their home? Or might it have had a significance that's lost on our modern eyes? It's impossible to say. The problem with supposedly ancient inscriptions etched on stone is that it's not always easy to say what's real and what's a hoax. Take the Bat Creek inscription as an example. It was found in a burial mound close to Knoxville, Tennessee, USA in 1889. That means we've had over 130 years to and yet we still don't know if it's a genuine ancient mystery or a more recent attempt at fraud. If it's real, the symbols carved into its surface might be a pre-Columbian written language. Hundreds of attempts to translate the message have been made, but none have succeeded. There isn't a known language to compare it to, and translating such a short series of characters without a comparison is probably impossible. It was initially suspected that the inscription was written in an ancient Cherokee language, but Semitic language expert Cyrus Gordon suggested in the 1970s that the characters might come from an early Paleo-Hebrew language. According to him, the message says, for Judea, and is proof that a Judean tribe arrived in the Americas long before any Europeans. Unsurprisingly, the controversial theory has few supporters in the 21st century. If you can work out the true purpose of volvelle paper machines, you'll outstrip the achievements of any living historian. What we know for certain is that the surprisingly complex machines can be used to calculate the date and the time. According to Ramon Lull of Mallorca, the man who invented the volvelle in the 13th century, they can also calculate and identify absolute truth. It would be easy to dismiss such a claim as the ramblings of a madman, but Lull was among the most respected scientists of his era. His invention is comparable to the astrolabe, with the important distinction that the volvelle is much smaller and made of paper rather than brass and steel. Lull believed that every religion in the world of his time ought to be assimilated into one, and he also believed that the volvelle would somehow help with that process. If anybody ever understood how that process would work, the information has been lost. We know that aligning the hole in the volvelle with the pole star and then centering the crossed circles around it would give you the date and the approximate time, and maybe your approximate location, too. But how it could determine the truth is a mystery. Still, that didn't prevent them from being banned for fear that they could be used in witchcraft or sorcery. Today, we know former Viking chieftain Harald Bluetooth best because his name has been taken and appropriated by Bluetooth technology, along with his personal rune. The rune serves as the technology's logo. Prior to this, though, he was best known for creating the enormous rune complex in Denmark known as the Jelling Stones. These enormous rocks are a record of the conversion of the Vikings from their ancient Norse religious beliefs to Christianity. The process happened slowly, between the years 826 and 965. On the stones, we see scenes taken from ancient Norse legends and myths. But as the stories progress, the ancient Norse heroes are defeated by Christ and other scenes from Christian iconography. Historians in the country view the Jelling Stones almost as a birth certificate, marking the beginning of medieval Denmark and the beginning of the end for the Vikings and their way of life. While much of the narrative of the carvings can be understood, there are still sections that are hard to follow and, in places, become totally undecipherable. Sadly, if we don't understand them now, it's unlikely that we ever will. Speaking of hard-to-decipher ancient runes and symbols, here's the Koval spearhead. It was found by a farmer as he plowed his field in Volhynia, Ukraine in 1858. The iron spearhead is covered in small, delicately carved inscriptions and ornamentation, very little of which has ever been fully translated or understood. Historians think the artifact was made during the 3rd century and is probably, but not definitely, a relic of the Goths. From the small sections we can translate, we can say that the spearhead contains the words, Thither Rider, which is a good luck message, and also a description of the spear's trajectory. The presence of a crescent moon symbol might imply that the spearhead was thought to have magical properties. That wouldn't be unusual for the Goths. Many Germanic warriors believed their spears to be either blessed or magical. Maybe these magical properties might explain how the artifact has disappeared. The version of the Koval spearhead on display in Berlin is a replica, as is the one in Warsaw. The original was taken by Nazi SS officer Peter Paulsen during the Second World War and has never been seen since. Most of you will have heard legends about a statue that can weep, bleed, or do something else that statues shouldn't be capable of. Here's a statue that's said to be able to do both of those things and a whole lot more. It's the Lady of Akita, a representation of the Virgin Mary that was carved by a Buddhist woodcutter during the 1960s and then given to a convent in the town of Akita, Japan. Within 10 years of being installed, the statue developed a nationwide reputation for performing miracles. Aside from the crying and the weeping, many instances of which have been witnessed by multiple people, the statue has been credited with curing blindness, deafness, and even cancer. The official position of the Catholic Church is that the statue is a holy object and the miracles are real. Video footage of both the weeping and the bleeding can be found on the internet, but there's a catch. Samples of blood have been taken from the statue on two separate occasions during the 21st century, and subsequent tests have shown that the blood came from two different human individuals. That implies that some people in the convent are feeding the statue their own blood. The Lady of Akita is almost certainly a hoax, but that won't shake the faith of most believers. We've rolled out the red carpet for you at CineMysteria, where you'll be gripped by the highs and lows of Hollywood legends. We dig deep into movie mysteries, unveiling the secret subtexts in epic films and the failures that made franchises flop. It's a terrific tour of silver screen success and cinematic catastrophes. Subscribe to CineMysteria, where Hollywood's hidden stories come to light. Subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and you will be the first to know when a new video comes out. Thank you for watching and see you soon!