Ancient Egyptian Sundial Unearthed In Valley Of The Kings After 3,300 Years

Hi, it's Kashrina. They're one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but the question has haunted us for millennia. How were the pyramids really built? Were they built by magic, aliens, or a million slaves whipped into submission? Forget everything you think you know because today we finally have the answer. Ancient Egyptian Sundial. Step aside, smartwatches. Ancient tech just got an upgrade. It turns out the Ancient Egyptians may have been clocking in for work 3,300 years ago with nothing but a rock, a stick, and some serious solar swagger. Even more than 3,000 years ago we were heading to work and someone was keeping track of our hours. Archaeologists digging in Egypt's legendary Valley of the Kings recently unearthed what might be the oldest Egyptian Sundial ever discovered. It's throwing shade on everything experts thought they knew about timekeeping. The find itself is a limestone chip known as an ostracon. It's about the size of a dinner plate with a semicircle and 12 precisely carved slices painted on it in black. In the center is a dent where researchers believe a metal or a wooden pin once stood. This metal pin casted shadows like a bossy little sunstick silently screaming, you're late for your shift again, Imhotep. This ancient slice of stone age scheduling dates to the 13th century BC in the middle of Egypt's 19th dynasty. It was a time when tombs were getting blinged out like pyramid-shaped nightclubs. But the sundial wasn't found in a temple or atop a monument. It was casually lying on the floor of a workman's hut. This, my friends, is what makes the discovery so cool. The sundial was in a hut where laborers hung out. They probably used it to keep track of their lunch breaks. Dr. Suzanne Bickel of the University of Basel, who led the team that discovered the sundial, called it significant because it predates previous sundial finds by around a thousand years. Most sundials discovered in Egypt are Greco-Roman, but this one is pure OG Egyptian. Experts figured the sundial was either used to actually track workers' breaks, like I said before, or it was a tool to track the god Ra's daily cruise across the sky, mirroring texts painted on tomb walls that describe the sun god's epic nightly voyage. Why not both things? Amazingly, the sundial wasn't alone. It was found among limestone chips, covered in sketches, doodles, and notes, including depictions of deities and little scribbled messages. In other words, this was an ancient jobsite whiteboard. Picture hieroglyphic post-its and lunchtime sketches of Anubis. What does this all mean? It means that even in the age of pyramids, scarabs, and god kings, someone had to know when it was time to clock out. Whether the sundial tracked sacred hours or coffee breaks, the Egyptians were cracking down on extended breaks way before your boss. Space tech just solved the mystery of the pyramids. The secret to building the pyramids has been hiding in plain sight. Long before Egypt became the ultimate tourist destination and the best place to get sand in your pants, it was a lot wetter. I'm talking trees, pool parties, and very happy crocodiles. The Nile was practically a water park, with hippos instead of lifeguards. Scientists have found an extinct branch of the River Nile, an old and forgotten piece of this great aquatic playground, and it turns out it was used to build the pyramids. You know, the tall triangles on everyone's bucket list. I'm sure you've heard of them. This wasn't some baby stream you would skip stones across. This was the aquatic equivalent of a four-lane highway. It may have been used to bring the pyramids' building blocks right up to the construction site. That is serious convenience. The pyramid blocks may have been transported by ship or barge. When did this lost watery thoroughfare exist? Try 4,700 years ago. Dr. Iman Ghanim is the radar-wielding space detective responsible for breaking this case wide open. Using satellite data, she unearthed a colossal dry-up waterway that used to snake through the Nile Valley. It's since been dubbed the Aramat Branch. This ancient river strutted its way past 38 pyramid sites like a VIP limo on the red carpet. It was nearly half a mile wide in some places, which is shocking because that is the official width of the actual Nile today. Egypt looks so much different in ancient times. I would have loved to see it. How about you? Dr. Ghanim told IFL Science that these pyramids weren't just near the river, they were right on its metaphorical doorstep. This means that many of the valley temples around Giza likely doubled as ancient loading docks. Scientists might have to re-evaluate a lot of Egyptian structures. Now before we grab our snorkels and start digging up ancient boats, here's what you need to know. Scientists still don't have 100% confirmation that the Aramat Branch was alive and splashing during the time the pyramids were built. But given the evidence, like the 38 pyramids conveniently parked along its banks, the case is looking solid. There's one more awesome thing that's come from this discovery. Scientists suspect that as this branch of the Nile dried up, so did many of the towns that once hugged its shores. Whole cities just vanished. Poof, gone, like your last good hair day. These lost cities are presumably under the sand, just waiting to be dug up by someone with a shovel and a metal detector, maybe some lidar. So while this discovery helps finalize the details behind the construction of the pyramids, it also opens the door to finding entirely new lost cities. And I for one can't wait. Stonehenge's giant altar stone solved. For anyone who has ever struggled to move a sofa up a flight of stairs or tried to navigate a tight corner with furniture, let's take a moment to appreciate something truly miraculous. 5,000 years ago, someone in Neolithic Britain looked at a six-ton slab of stone in Scotland and thought, yeah, I could drag that to Wiltshire. Thus began one of the greatest prehistoric engineering feats in history. The altar stone of Stonehenge was transported 466 miles on a journey south from the Arcadian Basin in Scotland. It went through terrain that didn't even have the courtesy of roads, trucks, or industrial-grade lifting equipment, all the way to Salisbury Plain in England. Let me repeat that. A six-ton rock was moved 466 miles to take its place in the center of Stonehenge. Why? How? It was one thing when scientists thought the stones all came from Priscilli Hills in Wales, but to find out the altar stone is from Scotland is truly baffling. Researchers led by Anthony Clark from Curtin University analyzed mineral grains in the stone using mass spectrometry. The results were like geological GPS coordinates pointing directly at Scotland, proving the rock came a long, long way. Clark himself has a uniquely personal connection to this discovery. He grew up near the Priscilli Hills in Wales and visited Stonehenge as a baby. When Anthony grew up, he moved to Australia but then returned to the UK at 25 to help crack open Stonehenge's enduring mystery. Talk about the circle of life. Now let's get to the meaty part. How did they do it? You bet your socks that Anthony has a revolutionary explanation. If you're imagining cavemen dragging this boulder across half of Britain, stop it right now. Anthony and his colleagues think the Neolithic people were smarter than that. The likely scenario is that they used boats, as in ancient seafaring cargo shipping, coasting down Britain's shores with a monolithic passenger in tow. Hard to imagine, but it's the most logical explanation. Which means the history books are about to change forever. Because if there was a functional, long-distance shipping route in 2600 BC that's rivaled modern Amazon Prime's logistics plan, things are going to need to be rewritten. Did the people of England have the altar stone sent to them? Or did they go get it on one of their seaworthy vessels? The new theory is that there is no way they dragged a boulder heavier than your pickup truck across almost 500 miles of rolling hills. It just didn't happen. And don't even get me started on why Stonehenge was built. Ancient ritual center, pilgrimage hotspot, giant cosmic calendar. The jury's still out, so be sure to share your favorite theory in the comments. And now for a quick break because it's shoutout time. I want to give a big thank you to Angelicros and Thomas O'Day for supporting this channel. We wouldn't be here without you guys. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already and hit that notification bell so you don't miss out. The Mayan Calendar finally decoded. For decades, the mysterious 819-day Maya calendar has been a cosmic riddle that made even seasoned archaeologists want to lie down and stare into the void. It didn't line up with anything. It made no sense. Scholars poked, prodded, and charted it against planetary orbits and found no connections. But finally, scientists have cracked the code. But now everything has changed. This whole time, scientists have been looking at the ancient Maya calendar all wrong. According to a new study in ancient Mesoamerica, the trick to understanding the calendar is to stop treating it like a short-term planner and zoom way, way out. The Maya weren't messing with single-year calendars like we do today. They were playing long-game astronomy, with their calendars syncing up to a 45-year view of the solar system. Tulane University researchers were the ones who just cracked the code. They say the 819-day cycle isn't just for one planet. It's a master plan that syncs with the synodic periods of every major planet visible to the naked eye. Synodic means how long it takes a planet to return to the same spot in Earth's sky. The calendar is so dastardly confusing because you can't make sense of it in one cycle, or two, or ten. You need 20 full 819-day cycles, which is 16,380 days, to understand how the calendar works. Then, suddenly, all the planetary years click into place like some kind of ancient astronomical Rubik's Cube. Mercury has a synodic period of 117 days, which fits neatly into 819. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all fit perfectly into this cycle. The calendar doesn't work if you're only tracking Earth. You have to take into account six planets over a span of about 45 years. No wonder this thing is so confusing. No one in the world taught these guys how to calendar. Where did they get such weird cosmic knowledge from? The Mayans didn't just invent one calendar, they had many, each used for different cosmic, agricultural, and ceremonial reasons. But this 819-day one, found in ancient Glyphic texts, always stood out as the weird uncle of the bunch. It didn't match lunar cycles, it didn't match the solar year, it was just sort of odd. Turns out, it wasn't odd at all. It was genius. Too genius for how ancient it is. The Mayans weren't just stargazing farmers with fancy jungle pyramids. They were data-driven sky watchers who built systems to predict planetary behavior with mathematical elegance. It's our fault that we underestimated them. Scientists may need to re-evaluate everything they thought they understood about the Mayans. Let me know if you want to see a dedicated video. Who Invented Zero? What if I told you that nothing could change everything? Once upon a time, long before smartphones or that sinking feeling you get checking your bank account, humans counted things the hard way. Our early ancestors used their fingers, rocks, and even goats. And then came the greatest invention in the history of numbers. Someone came up with the idea of zero, the concept of nothing. This revolutionized the world of ancient mathematics, engineering, and language. But surprisingly, it didn't make it to Europe for ages. Europeans didn't get the memo about zero until the 1100s, just a short 900 years ago. For most of history, people were doing math without zero. That's like trying to do Sudoku blindfolded or trying to pay your rent with Monopoly money. It's a good try, but it's not going to work. A little earlier, around 2000 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, counting was serious business, and cuneiform tablets were the excel spreadsheets of the day. The Sumerians were the first to leave space to indicate an absence in member columns. Space as in literal nothingness. They had the right idea, but never gave that nothing its own dedicated symbol. Then, around the 3rd century BC, the Babylonians showed up and said, hold my mead. They introduced two teeny wedges as placeholders in their base 60-number system. Still, the Babylonians treated zero like a shy party guest. It was useful, but not exactly welcome to mingle on its own. Meanwhile, across the globe, our calendar-crafting friends the Mayans were busy being geniuses. Around 350 AD, the Mayans tossed a little shell-shaped symbol into the mix. It was their version of zero, a little shell designed to represent nothing. Used mostly to track time, it helped predict lunar cycles and sacrificial schedules. But again, it was a placeholder, not a full-fledged number. To find the real first zero, we've got to go where ancient scholars were obsessed with math. While the Greek scholars were busy being philosophical and drinking wine, Indian mathematicians were hard at work. And no one was working harder than Brahmagupta, a 7th-century Indian who used a small dot to represent nothing. And while the Maya had already done this with their shell symbol, Brahmagupta stepped things up a notch. He also treated zero as a real number with real powers. He named it sunya, meaning empty, and declared that subtracting a number from itself equals zero. This might be standard 2nd-grade math, but in this 7th century, it was groundbreaking stuff. After India, the Arabs caught on in 773. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi picked up India's zero playbook. He polished it and folded it into a shiny new system he called al-Jabr. Algebra. Algebra. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Of course! Algebra. This guy was the inventor of algebra, the thing that haunted your teenage dreams. Zero now had not just a shape but a major role in equations and logic. By the end of the 8th century, India and Arabia had a real zero. Europe, forever late to the party, didn't catch on for another 300 years or so. It was Fibonacci in the 1100s who wrote the book Liber Abaci, exposing Europe to the idea that nothing mattered. Literally, nothing matters. Nothing, as in zero, is one of the most important aspects of math. How the ancients built pyramids and tombs without zero might be more of a mystery than how they moved the rocks in the first place. These civilizations were off-grid before it was cool. Your smart home isn't as smart as you think it is. Long before we slapped solar panels on rooftops or argued about wind turbines ruining beach selfies, ancient civilizations were living their best sustainable lives, powered by nothing but the sun, the wind, and some serious brain power. This is how mighty cultures harnessed nature's power, long before going off-grid became a modern aspiration. Let's start with the obvious MVP, the sun. It gives us warmth, crops, and for thousands of years people across the globe have worshipped it. In Neolithic China, villages were built like natural sun traps. Homes faced south, letting in that sweet low-angled winter sun, while smart overhanging roofs blocked the harsh summer rays. Who needs a thermostat when your house is basically doing solar yoga? Compared to modern houses that are built with absolutely no protection from the sun at all, the ancient Chinese were brilliant. You know how your house heats up to about 6,000 degrees every summer, peaking in the evening when it seems all the heat of the sun has gathered in your living room to melt you? Well, that's because your house sucks. Sorry. Neolithic people built better heat-resistant houses than modern contractors. By 4000 BC, the Chinese were already studying the sun's movements and designing their homes in sync with the sun. Pretty smart, huh? Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, Socrates was moonlighting as a solar energy influencer. The guy held classes on passive solar home design. Even the Romans, who once ran out of trees thanks to enthusiastic deforestation, started writing how-to manuals on solar energy. If they had invented YouTube, it would have been full of toga-clad influencers saying, smash that amphora if you like this heating hack. And let's not forget the Kang, a Chinese heated bed platform. Wealthy households captured the leftover heat from cooking fires and piped it through bricks to warm their sleeping areas. They invented radiant floor heating. And here I am shivering in the winter because my floors are as cold as an ice rink. But what about years when there was little sun? What did ancient people do then? They turned to their plan B, the wind. In ancient Persia, they built azbads, towering windmills that weren't just for show. These beasts harnessed the mighty Shemal winds to grind grain and pump water. The Persians were using wind-powered machines thousands of years ago. Yet today, windmills are controversial for some reason. China got in on the wind game too, with early wind-powered pumps. But arguably the smoothest wind operators were the ancient Egyptians. The Nile River flowed north, but fortunately for the Egyptians, the prevailing winds blew south. Using this knowledge to their advantage, the Egyptians sailed south on the wind to get to mines and quarries, then floated back north on the current with boats full of gold, granite, and exhausted workers. It was peak efficiency. Like they say, work smarter, not harder. The next time someone says renewable energy is a new thing, hit them with the wisdom you've picked up here today. Ancient civilizations were already using solar heating in their homes, sailing on strategic winds, and harnessing the power of the breeze to run their machines. Do you think maybe it's time to get back to basics? The Great Serpent Mound. Forget Stonehenge and forget the pyramids for a minute. Ohio has a slithering secret. What if I told you this secret is a 1,200-foot-long snake, and it's made of dirt? Tucked away in the rolling green of southern Ohio, it has seven perfect coils, a tightly curled tail, and a suspiciously wide-eyed head. And it goes by the name of Serpent Mound. To be frank, it looks like a giant dirt snake emoji rising out of the ground. In reality, though, this place is the largest effigy mound on the planet. It's a prehistoric monument so massive and mysterious, it's like the Mona Lisa of dirt, but with fewer smiles and a lot more topsoil. You can find Serpent Mound for yourself on a plateau in Adams County, Ohio, above Ohio Brush Creek. And while you're there admiring this engineering marvel of the ancients, take a look at your feet. You're standing in an ancient meteor crater that's about 300 million years old. The great mound was built on top of an actual impact site. Did the ancient people do that on purpose? Or is this the weirdest coincidence ever? The jury's still out, but that shouldn't come as a surprise because the jury is still out on pretty much everything relating to Serpent Mound. For example, nobody can agree on what the serpent's head is doing. Some scholars say it's about to devour a hollow egg. Others say it's just got a dramatically oversized eyeball. And a few brave folks believe it's trying to eat the sun like some ancient reptilian pac-man. Which do you think is most likely? Maybe it'll help if I drop a few more deets. The head of this huge, soily serpent points to the summer solstice sunset. Wow, that was a tongue twister. And the tail aims at the winter solstice sunrise, which could mean that like so many ancient megaliths, Serpent Mound is a calendar. Though I'd prefer to call it a cosmic snake clock. And get this, the snake's coils line up with the constellation Draco, and the first bend matches up with the star Thuban, which used to be Earth's north star. This mound might be the original analog GPS. Okay, that's awesome. So it aligns with stars in the heavens and tracks the solstices. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The biggest being, who in the heck built this thing? If you're thinking aliens, slow down. The real drama is between two ancient Native American cultures, the Adena and the Fort Ancient. In the late 1800s, Harvard archaeologist Frederick Ward Putnam showed up, dug a bunch of trenches, and confidently pointed to the Adena culture of 500 BC to 200 AD as the builders. His reasoning was that a nearby burial mound he excavated was full of classic Adena swag, things like pottery, projectile points, and burials. Then in the 1940s, archaeologist James Bennett Griffith doubled down on that theory after analyzing artifacts and muttering, yep, definitely Adena. But the case wasn't closed. In the 1990s, scientists did the science thing and carbon-dated charcoal from the site. The results showed that the mound is not as ancient as people thought. It dates to around 920 AD, 1400 years later than was assumed. This planted the serpent in the Fort Ancient culture's territory. Then in 2014, another group said, let's test more charcoal, and those samples dated back to 321 BC. Welcome back, Adena culture! Scientists think the Adena may have built the mound, and then the Fort Ancient culture showed up 1,400 years later and spruced the place up like they were on an episode of Home Makeover. There's one part of the mystery solved, sort of. The next part is figuring out what the mound was used for. Sure, it may have doubled as a calendar, but what was its true purpose? A lot of people aren't convinced by the cosmic snake clock theory. They think it was all about snake worship, which was a thing in many Native American cultures, where snakes were viewed as supernatural symbols of rebirth and fertility. There are other mounds nearby, just smaller and less snake-shaped. And in those mounds, scientists have found a lot of ancient stuff. But never in Serpent Mound, which suggests the snake was too holy, too sacred to be used as a mere grave. If you were going to join a prehistoric cult that worshipped an animal, which animal would you like to worship? Let me know in the comments, and hit that subscribe button while you're at it! The Tartarian Theory There was once a secret super-civilization that ruled the world, and you've probably never heard of them. While all memory of their deeds has been wiped out, their engineering accomplishments are still all around us, maybe even right down the street from your house. They are called the Tartarians, a mysterious, possibly giant-sized, free-energy-loving civilization that built skyscrapers, harvested atmospheric electricity, and got completely erased from history by a mud flood. The Tartarian Empire is one of the internet's newest and biggest conspiracy theories. I don't even know where it came from. There's no proof that any of it is real, but it is catching on like wildfire. The theory claims that the architectural world we live in is basically just recycled infrastructure from a forgotten golden age that your history teacher conveniently skipped, probably because it didn't happen. According to the net's finest French historians, the Tartarians were a globe-spanning empire of architectural masterminds, tech wizards, and ten-foot-tall human giants who predated modern civilization. They supposedly harnessed free energy, built massive, ornate structures with spires, domes, and metalwork that no one today could replicate without a $20 billion budget and a nervous breakdown. They also had flying machines cruising the skies before the Wright Brothers ever sneezed on paper. And then, in the blink of an eye, it was all gone, buried under a global mud flood. And you thought Noah had a rough go of it. The craziest part of the theory is that many of the Tartarian structures not only survived, but were repurposed by modern humans. If you've ever admired the White House, the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican, or your local 19th century post office, you've admired Tartarian architecture. The idea is that although most of the empire was destroyed, a handful of their most impressive buildings survived, and we are reusing them today. But no one knows about it. Why does no one know? Because the world's powerful elites have conspired to hide the truth. They don't want humans knowing about limitless energy, free energy, teleportation, or that a utopia in which people don't need to work just to live is possible. To keep the truth under wraps, the Tartarian infrastructure was stolen, repurposed, and passed off as modern marvels. The rest that wasn't destroyed in the mud flood was allegedly bombed to oblivion during World War II. One of my favorite tidbits from this theory has to do with everyone's favorite explorer slash pool game. They say that Marco Polo never wrote about the Great Wall of China during his travels because it wasn't built by the Chinese. It was built by the Tartarians to keep the Chinese out. Um, that's a bit awkward. The most bizarre embalming method you've never heard of. I hope you've got your weird pants on because this one is nasty. In the quiet Austrian village of St. Thomas M. Blasenstein lies a mystery that's been fermenting for nearly 300 years. At the center of this fable is a dead monk, a handful of wood chips, and the most unorthodox use of fabric swatches since Project Runway the Caveman chronicles. Meet Franz Eber Siddler von Rosenegg, a dead parish vicar. Back in 1746, Siddler passed away at the age of 37. But unlike the rest of us who simply decompose like nature intended, Siddler took a detour into mummyhood. When locals found his body preserved like beef jerky, they affectionately dubbed him the air-dried chaplain, which kind of sounds like a snack you'd find at Whole Foods. His body, found remarkably intact in a church crypt, was believed to be connected to miraculous healings. People came from far and wide for divine intervention, believing that witnessing the monk's preserved corpse could heal them. Throughout the years, scientists argued over what killed the monk and how his body remained so perfectly intact. Then in 2000, they busted out the x-ray machine. X-ray images suggested that Siddler might have swallowed a poison capsule, but there was still the enigma of his mummified flesh. So in 2024, a team of scientists decided to get answers, and boy did they ever. After a very close look using internal CT scans and a peek up the monk's rear end, totally scientific, don't worry, nothing weird here, they uncovered something not even the wildest historical fiction would have predicted. No wonder he wasn't rotting. The monk had been secretly embalmed. But the method used was a little unorthodox. As awkward as it is, I have to tell you, he was embalmed via his back door, if you catch my meaning. Instead of opening up the torso like the classic textbook mummy recipe, Siddler was preserved by being stuffed full of wood chips, twigs, fabric, and even a glass bead. All of this material was funneled through his bum like someone was aggressively stuffing a turkey or filling up a scarecrow with grass. It was a gnarly job, but the results speak for themselves. Siddler is now a surprisingly well-preserved corpse with an origin story to haunt your next trip to the Lumber Isle. So, was this an act of ancient genius? Or just a case of some embalmers with a weird fetish? Ghosts of a Dream. If you build it, they will come. That's what they say, but in truth, that's not exactly accurate. China just spent a whopping 300 million dollars to turn back the clocks. They built Dayang Town in Zhangjiajie, an ancient town constructed from scratch in the heart of a modern Chinese city. And guess who showed up? Nobody. This place is a dream come true. Carved stone arches, red lanterns swaying in the breeze, cobbled alleys where ancient merchants could have once bartered spices and silk. Designed to be a tourism crown jewel, Dayang was supposed to be history brought to life. It was meticulously crafted to be the perfect replica of a real-life ancient town from over 2,200 years ago. And isn't that what we've all been asking for? Forget Disney World, we want Roman World. Give us Mesopotamia Land or Egypt Fun Town. In China, they actually did it. They built an entire ancient town and then nobody showed up. Since opening in 2021, Dayang Town has become the Disneyland of dashed hopes. In the first half of this year, just 2,300 tickets were sold. That's fewer than 20 visitors per day. Locals now refer to it as a ghost town, and not in a charming haunted tea house kind of way. Stores sit empty, the main square echoes with silence, lanterns hang faded and tattered like the town's torn hopes. Even local shopkeepers have said no to paying rent. They banded together and staged a rent rebellion. Since no one was going to the town or buying anything from the merchants, they weren't going to pay rent just to go broke. With the place deserted and shopkeepers in open revolt, Dayang Town has morphed into an unplanned public park. Locals now use this sprawling complex for dog walks, toddler bike rides, and the occasional game of badminton under those faded red lanterns. To be honest, it sounds like the perfect neighborhood. No neighbors, ancient architecture, and all the sidewalk you can handle. Would you live in an ancient Chinese city, even if the city wasn't ancient at all, and you were the only resident? Thanks for watching! Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!