Nobody Knows Who Built These Towers

Nobody knows who built these ancient towers. They cling to vertical cliffs in one of the most isolated mountain ranges on Earth, hundreds of them perfectly positioned. But when archaeologists dig beneath them, the timeline stops making sense. Yet they're not alone. Across the region, monolithic chambers, megalithic dolmens, underground structures that defy easy explanation. So what's really going on in the Caucasus? And what else have we quietly forgotten? Hi guys, welcome back. If you're new here, my name is Michael. I have a degree in ancient history and on this channel, we discuss the unexplainable mysteries of our past. Let's get into it. Hundreds of stone towers like this one are scattered across the Caucasus mountain region between Europe and Asia. But the weird part? These towers are almost completely inaccessible, built into vertical rock faces, where one wrong step is a fatal plummet to death. Yet someone built hundreds of them across these mountains. Now, records from the medieval era suggest that these towers were built between the 13th and the 17th centuries. Case closed, right? Well, no. Because when archaeologists start digging beneath the visible towers, they find something far older. And that's where the timeline stops behaving. Guys, I just want to quickly say I'm starting a brand new channel. All the details are in the description below, but it would really, really, really help me out if you could subscribe and help get this off the ground. It would mean a lot. So please do me a favor and subscribe. The link is in the description. Thank you. So here's the problem with the Caucasus. Here's why this region is so difficult for historians. The Caucasus isn't like Mesopotamia, where you get convenient king lists and chronicles stretching back millennia. Instead, what you get here is chaos. Dozens of isolated mountain valleys, each separated by terrain so extreme that communities just a few kilometers apart ended up developing completely different languages. This man named Abu al-Hassan was an Arab historian and geographer, and he nicknamed the region the Mountain of Tongues because medieval travelers would cross a single ridge and suddenly no one could understand them anymore. Today, linguists consider the region a living laboratory of cultural diversity because they have entire language families that exist nowhere else on Earth. Throughout history, empires like the Persians and the Ottomans tried to seize control of these regions, and they succeeded with the lowlands, the coastal areas, and some vital trade routes. But the interior highlands, where these towers are, those remained isolated and impregnable. Which means no empire documented what was happening up there, which means in turn no central records. And this is exactly why these towers are such a mystery. The fragmentation. Because when you have over 70 isolated societies speaking different languages, and almost none are literate, history just doesn't survive the same way it does normally. And this is crucial because it explains why even the written history we do have of the Caucasus isn't enough. Most written records of the Caucasus are not just late, they're external, written by outsiders who didn't understand the context and often just wrote down whatever they were told. But even at that, these records are mostly about the lowlands, with little or nothing about the mountains where these towers are. Which is why archaeology matters so much in the Caucasus. Here, the ground speaks louder than texts, because the texts simply aren't there. Now to what these people actually built. Towers. Hundreds of them. And the weird thing is, they're in places that make no sense. The Ingush people, along with other Vainak groups in the Caucasus, built towers over 20 meters high. That's like a six-story building. But they're extremely narrow and clustered to form complexes on steep mountain slopes, with thick walls and small interiors that barely fit a handful of people. The entrances are also elevated off the ground, so that you can't just walk in, you have to climb very dangerous cliffs. In Georgia's Svaneti region, you can see this same pattern repeated. Tower houses built tall and narrow, with no apparent purpose. But some sites take this to the extreme. I'm talking about the Vovnushki towers. These ones are anchored directly into rock cliff walls, where just getting there requires serious climbing. To put it simply, these towers are nearly impossible to access. Yet, and here's the intriguing part, a lot of these towers sit way above the good farming land, where people would naturally want to live. So whoever built them seems to have deliberately chosen sites where it's cold, rocky and barely farmable. This of course raises the question, why? Why build there instead of near your food source? Well, the answer comes when you observe what the structures prioritize. Narrow entrances you have to climb into to reach, super thick walls, strategic placement overlooking passes and movement corridors. So these aren't villages, no. Very likely what we're looking at is a network of defensive infrastructure, engineered across an entire mountain range. But still, the mystery doesn't end there. You see, many of the tower houses we see today in the Caucasus are medieval, built between the 13th and 17th centuries. And the records from that time tell a pretty straightforward story. Medieval people built towers, case closed. Except the archaeology tells a different story. And what archaeologists find when they dig suggests that tower building didn't actually start in the medieval era. No, it actually goes back much further. Here's something that got me thinking for a second. When archaeologists excavated these sites, they found that many of these medieval towers had older foundation layers underneath, earlier construction phases, stone foundations that appear to have been reused and built over. Now, stone building in the Caucasus dates back as far as the 1st and 2nd millennium BC. Think megalithic construction and cyclopean walls. The kind of work that requires planning and coordination over generations. So, of course, it makes sense that many of these towers aren't entirely original constructions. The story checks out and is perfectly consistent with both logic and evidence. Which means the medieval builders were not creating this system from nothing. They were inheriting it. In multiple cases, the visible medieval towers sit directly on earlier stone phases, foundations that predate the written references to these societies. And here's the uncomfortable part. By the time written history begins describing these mountain communities, the people who first established some of these sites were already gone. Their names were never recorded. Their language never documented. Their political structure never described. The defensive system appears in the archaeological record long before it appears in the written one. So we end up with a layered system. Medieval clans we can name. And beneath them, an earlier architectural phase that we cannot attach to any recorded people. That is not speculation, that is a documentation gap. Unfortunately, inheritance is one of the hardest things to trace in archaeology. Later builders reuse the same stones, the same sites, the same foundations. And in doing so, they gradually erase the original blueprint. So what we're left with looks like the final draft of a document. Except the first pages are missing. And it gets even more confusing because even these early layers are fragmentary and hard to connect to specific people or even date with any kind of precision. Because by the time writing finally shows up in the Caucasus, when Byzantine and Persian writers mention the region, well, whoever built those earlier layers was already long gone. Their identities were lost, their language was unknown, the cultural context completely invisible. Now archaeology can tell you how something was constructed, even how it was used or abandoned. But here's the thing, it often can't tell you when or who. And it cannot tell you who built these tower houses, what language they spoke, what they believed, why they chose these locations, what they were defending against. All that human context is gone. All that's left is architecture, sophisticated, strategic, but also anonymous. And not because the societies who built these towers were simple, primitive, or disorganized. Far from it. They just happened to exist before writing arrived in the region and vanish before anyone could record who they were. So we've got a real mystery here. Anonymous builders, sophisticated defensive architecture, foundations that predate any documentation. Which raises an obvious question, what were the builders so afraid of? If you look at one tower by itself, it's impressive. But plot them on a map and something changes. Valley to valley, pass to pass, ridge to ridge. Many of these towers sit within visible range of one another. Not randomly, but deliberately positioned to overlook the mountains. From certain points you can see the next tower, and from that one, the next one again. Suddenly, it stops looking like isolated construction. It starts looking like infrastructure. So it's quite logical to think that perhaps these towers formed a sort of early warning system. Perhaps people climbed into these towers, monitoring potential invasion risks and communicating to the community through fire at night, or smoke during the day, or reflected light in clear weather. Think of the lighting of the beacons of Gondor in the Lord of the Rings, something like that. The point is though, you couldn't sneak up on these people. You couldn't besiege one of these towers without being detected by the whole system. You couldn't move an army through these mountains without someone spotting you kilometers away and passing that information on. It's very likely then that these towers weren't built to win fights, but to make sneak attacks impossible. But while the towers are fascinating, they are far from the only historical blind spots in the Caucasus. No, there's more. Sure, we can understand defensive structures, watchtowers, fortifications, all of that makes sense. What doesn't make sense, however, are structures with no defensive purpose whatsoever, like the Volkonsky Dolmen. Now, dolmens in this region generally date from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BC, so late Neolithic, Bronze Age. And most were built from slabs, huge dressed stones fitted together with a portal in front. Volkonsky's, however, is different. It's carved from one block of sandstone, not built, carved. The entire interior chamber is about 1.5 meters high and was hollowed out of one rock mass with a perfectly circular entrance. And this makes Volkonsky unique because other Caucasus dolmens are mostly made from slabs. But that's not even the strangest part. Most archaeologists date Volkonsky to the 3rd or 2nd millennium BC, but honestly, no one knows for sure. It's not even clear why this particular dolmen was built so differently or why it was even made in the first place. Now, some dolmens contain human remains, although even in these cases, the remains appear to have been added long after construction, suggesting secondary intimates. In other words, these dolmens were probably not built to be tombs. They were only converted to tombs later on, so we don't even know their original purpose. We just know how they were eventually used. Volkonsky, on the other hand, is even worse. It literally gives us nothing. No remains, no secondary use, no clues. And here's the key problem. Slab-built dolmens already existed in this region. That method was proven, repeatable, and far less labor-intensive. But Volkonsky is monolithic. The chamber was carved out of a single massive sandstone block. That choice required more time, more coordination, more effort. So the question isn't could they build it? It's why did they choose the hardest possible method? If it was just a tomb, a much simpler structure would have worked and did work elsewhere. Someone chose the hardest possible method to build this dolmen and we have no clear reason why. But if you think that's weird, what's underground is far, far weirder. Near Zeyoukavou village, there's a vertical shaft that shouldn't exist. The shaft is cylindrical, with very smooth walls and a chambered base, and it extends very deeply into the heart of the earth. The feature is called Zeyoukavou cave, or the Karahora shaft. At first glance, the cave looks engineered, but the problem is there's no archaeological evidence of human construction. So, geologists classify it as a natural formation. But even that is still problematic, because the Zeyoukavou cave doesn't neatly fit into any standard cave category. It's not a solution cave where water dissolves rock. It's not a lava tube. It's not a normal sinkhole either. Everything about this cave is just awkward, from its geometry to its texture, and so it continues to hang in some sort of academic limbo where no simple tag fits. Because this is the type of thing that happens in the Caucasus. Things fall between categories, and even basic questions, like whether a feature is natural or artificial, end up having no answers. And when explanations disappear, when basic questions about ancient structures can't be answered, something predictable happens. We start to fill in the gaps with myths. Across the Caucasus, folklore tells of giants, primordial ancestors, and first people who shaped the mountains. Beings who lifted huge stones and carved intricate structures into rock. And we see these myths consistently among different groups all along the Caucasus, from Georgia, Ingushetia, to Svaneta. Now these aren't necessarily proof of the existence of giants, at least not literally. They are, however, evidence of a memory gap. Because when knowledge of original construction or purpose is lost, when the builders are forgotten, then myth becomes a placeholder. Myth preserves the sense that something important happened. Even if specifics are forgotten, they show you how a people dealt with their lost memory. Which raises a very important question. Why don't we know more? We've got these massive defensive networks, carved chambers, underground shafts, all fascinating stuff. So why is it so obscure? Well, one part of the reason is obvious. As we've said, the region has dozens of languages, many of which have limited or no written traditions. And that makes it hard for researchers. But the 20th century also didn't help. The Soviet Union isolated this region, severely limiting any chances of Western collaboration. So many field reports remained inaccessible for decades. And then there's the issue of the terrain. The modern political fragmentation has scattered the sites in the Caucasus across multiple countries, including Georgia, Armenia, Ingushetia and Dagestan. And this only makes the region even more complicated to survey comprehensively. But there's another reason this place is so obscure, which is that it doesn't have a famous monument. Egypt has the pyramids. Mesopotamia has ziggurats and plenty of megalithic architecture. But the Caucasus has nothing. Instead of iconic monuments, it has scattered mysteries. Towers in the mountains, dolmens in the forests, shafts near forgotten villages. So it's not just that the Caucasus is a secret. It's also that it's overlooked. And that's precisely why these structures matter. Because it forces us to confront something uncomfortable about history. It's sheer unevenness. Look at what we have. Towers on cliffs with foundations we can't date. A carved chamber where simple slabs would have worked. An underground shaft that breaks every geological category. And underneath all of that, we have construction from a time before writing, built by unknown people whose names and languages are now completely lost. And that should bother you. Why doesn't this match what we've learned about human development? Why is a whole mountain range of sophisticated defense barely discussed? How do you get construction spanning thousands of years about which we know next to nothing and where we can't name the builders? The Caucasus isn't unique. It's a warning. Because if we can lose entire societies that built sophisticated architecture that's still standing, then what else did we lose? How much of what we've learned about human history is just gaps we filled in? And what are we still so confident about that's built on the same shaky ground? Thanks so much for watching, guys. I would really appreciate it if you could subscribe to my brand new channel down below. Subscribe to this one as well. Leave a like, comment, let me know what you think, and I'll see you next time.