Nan Madol: The Impossible City in the Pacific | Ancient Mysteries

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Nan Madol is the only city ever built on a coral reef. Off the island of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, more than ninety artificial islets rise from a shallow lagoon, separated by tidal canals and walled with stacked columns of black basalt. The largest walls still stand around seven and a half metres high. The total mass of stone moved is usually estimated at some seven hundred and fifty thousand tons.

The people who built it had no wheel, no pulley, no metal tools, no mortar and no draft animals. There is no basalt on the reef itself, so every column was brought from quarries elsewhere on Pohnpei, some of them tens of kilometres away by sea. Individual stones average around five tons and the largest cornerstones at the tomb of Nan Douwas are estimated near fifty tons. Pohnpeian tradition says two sorcerers, Olisihpa and Olosohpa, flew the stones through the air and founded the Saudeleur dynasty that ruled from the city for centuries.

In this documentary we look at what Nan Madol actually is, how outsiders first recorded it, the transport problem that still has no demonstrated solution, the oral history of the Saudeleur and their overthrow by Isokelekel, and the dating fight. Uranium thorium dating of coral used in construction places the great mortuary enclosure at around the year eleven eighty, making it the earliest monumental chiefly seat in the Pacific, while airborne laser scanning and geochemical sourcing have mapped the site and matched its stone to local quarries.

We also examine the taboo that keeps islanders away after dark, the death of a German governor who opened the central tomb in nineteen oh seven, the reports of sunken ruins in the lagoon and what subsidence and rising sea level really explain, and the claim that Nan Madol is a remnant of the lost continent of Mu. We weigh those fringe theories fairly and explain why geology and archaeology reject them, without pretending the honest questions are closed.


By https://www.youtube.com/@obscurearticles