# Roman Hypocausts are a myth



## dreamtime (Sep 14, 2020)

Introduction​Big parts of Italy are free of forests nowadays. We are told this is because the Ancient Romans used the wood to heat the houses of the rich (which supposedely required a few slaves working 24/7 for each house). Historians assume the Romans heated their houses, because there are underground ventilation systems in the Roman villas.


_You don't see a lot of trees in this photo because the Romans burned them all 2000 years ago_


_Source_​
So we are looking at a mere 7000 pounds of wood for an entire day of heating.

To put 48 cubic feet into perspective, a Roman Villa couldn't even be heated for a single week with a cord of wood:


The official timeline of hypocausts is surprisingly well known. A guy named Sergius Orata invented the thing 2000 years ago, but unfortunately it took 400 more long years to bring this complicated technology to perfection. As it is often the case with the official narrative, everything appears to be a bit backwards: It took the Romans a couple hundred years to not only heat baths, but also rooms. Wouldn't heating rooms have priority over heating baths?

​But Sergius Orata not only invented the hypocaust, he also was the first human to invent the cultivation of oysters. Below is a probably very accurate painting of Sergius teaching others how to cultivate oysters. Unfortunately it was only created more than 1000 years after his death, so may not be so accurate after all.




> It was expensive and labour-intensive to run a hypocaust, as it required constant attention to the fire and a lot of fuel, so it was a feature usually encountered only in large villas and public baths. - wiki


What we don't really know when it comes to hypocausts is how the Romans heated the air. Simply having large fires and inefficiently creating heat doesn't match with the high level of knowledge they had in other areas of life, even when seen through the mainstream eyes.

No Soot Anywhere​The hypocaust remains definitely don't look like smoke ran through it, as the stones are perfectly clean. In fact, I can't find a single image of a hypocaust stained and blackened with smoke. As far as I can tell there is no evidence at all that wood was burned, because we would see blackened stones at least in what is interpreted as a fireplace.

This is a contemporary medieval heating system in Spain called Gloria, an upgrade from the hypocaust, run with an open fire, and it simply leads the smoke under the stone floors and then through a chimney going straight up to the roof:


This is not the same as the Hypocaust system, because the Gloria system actually works, as the smoke more or less only runs through a traditional chimney. The space below the room and the chimney can be cleaned. But the Gloria system still wastes a lot of wood and hay. The walls are blackened with smoke, and it looks somewhat primitive.



> The wall above it is black from soot. The chimney is on the other side of the heated room. -
> Medieval Heating System Lives on in Spain


This is how a typical Roman hypocaust opening is supposed to look:


This opening is one of the few images that shows some kind of structure which could have been a 'fireplace', but it's hard to tell. Most images simply show the underground system and no big opening for making a fire.

This is the way the hypocaust was portrayed in the 18th Century, and this was based on the mainstream historians belief system, without having any archeological facts to support their idea:


The maintream theory goes that the heated smoke went through and left the building directly through pipes in the walls. This is extremely inefficient, but historians like this explanation, as it explains why so much wood was used.

We are then told that this system was improved *after* the fall of Rome in the middle Ages, with people suddenly discovering the simple fact that you drastically decrease fuel wasting when you slow the rate of combustion.

While the middle ages represented a decay in knowledge, in this case for some reason it was the other way round.

"Tubuli" and lack of soot staining​The Roman villa heated with a Roman Hypocaust would basically be like a giant chimney. They have to be cleaned regularly, otherwise they get clogged and there is a high chance of the soot to catch fire, so the entire building would quickly burn down. (That happens with chimney fires)


And not only is there no soot in the basements that have been dug out, there's also no soot within the hollow bricks which technically can't be cleaned. One early author on the topic even accused the archeologists of destroying the evidence of any soot on the stones, because there wasn't any to be found.

_
Studies in ancient technology_, Forbes, R. J.


Source

Hypocaust Theory by Otto Krell​Otto Krell was an engineer who lived from 1866 - 1938, and he published a theory on Roman Hypocausts in the beginning of the 20th Century in a book called 'Altrömische Heizungen'. Of course he was swiftly ignored by the establishment, which favors theoretical and spaced-out academics over people with practical and logical abilities.

Krell, cited above, claimed that there weren't really any hypocausts, but that the system was simply built to make the house dry after building it.




Attempt to recreate a hypocaust fire​So I have been doing some quick research, and it's a bit hilarious: link.

Archeologists tried to see how a hypocaust system works and lit up a fire below two Roman Villas. They tried to create a fire that would result in good heating temperatures for all rooms. But according to their paper, it is apparently to this day not possible to simply start a fire and heat a Roman villa without running into massive problems:



> Experiments in reconstructed facilities have proven that running them is nowhere near as easy and trouble-free as assumed.


Summary of the paper:



> Though many questions can be answered better based on this research, the fact remains that some of it is – though justifiable- speculation and combination.
> 
> Therefore it isn’t possible – even though desirable- to provide a patent medicine for the construction of a flawless hypocaust heating. The facilities are too different and each one has to be considered individually.
> 
> ...


So contemporary archeologists can't even make a primitive fire work to support their theories.

While they tried to reenact the whole 'heat a roman villa with fire' thing, they realized it is almost impossible to heat all the rooms in a balanced manner, but as a result the rooms were quickly stained with soot:




Carbon Monoxide​
Carbon Monoxide poisoning is a problem with Roman Hypocausts:



> The main disadvantage of the hypocaust system is a very dangerous one.  The fumes created by the fire in the furnace easily crept out of the holding space below the false floor and into the main space.  This silent killer is now known as carbon monoxide.  Although it is easily detectable and preventable today, the Romans probably had no idea of this concept.


There's a user on historum.com who has analyzed the whole situation and comes to the conclusion that a hypocaust is a nightmare which either kills the inhabitants by fire or toxic fumes, _if it works at all_.



> Eventually all the flue ways will block with soot and there appears no way, other than demolition, to clear them.





> The fuel used was normally wood but possibly some charcoal or coal. All these fuels when burnt in a bonfire give of gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odourless, tasteless and toxic gas. When carbon monoxide enters the body it prevents the blood from bringing oxygen to cells, tissues and organs, which can result in death. In the case of coal burning sulphur oxides and nitrogen oxides are produced. . The hypocaust was not an efficient use of fuel because most of the heat has to go up the chimney in order to keep the combustion system running. Wood would have had to be managed, charcoal produced, coal mined and all stored close at hand, even in a slave economy the returns would have effected the Roman pocket and in the late Roman period the economy was suffering.


Another attempt to recreate a Roman Villa Hypocaust system was a failure as well, increasing carbon monoxide concentration to dangerous levels:



> The Roman villa reconstruction programme 'Rome wasn't built in a day' which was on recently on channel 4 found the same thing regarding toxic gasses from tubuli. A bloke from the Health and Safety came along with his detector and said that the concentration of gasses was unacceptable at 8 feet above floor level but ok at head height. The programme speculated that this could be one of the reasons for the great height of Roman rooms and that the lack of sealed windows might help to disperse the gas.


Conclusion​There's no evidence connecting the ventilation system in so-called Roman villas with burning wood. The primary evidence of what this is about has been lost.

If the system was used for heating at all (I do think it was), it was probably powered by some now forgotten technology that was able to heat up the air below the houses, and the tubuli then pulled the air upwards to heat the entire house.

Acknowledging the missing evidence for wood burning in relation to Roman Hypocausts would inevitably lead archeologists to question the entire narrative of technological development in the Roman Era. That's why it was important for the mainstream dogma to force this consensus upon the public during the 20th Century, even though no one has ever seen any soot on any hypocaust remains. The research by Krell was ignored.

If wood wasn't used, there was a different source for energy which the 'Romans' had access to. Unfortunately no written evidence whatsoever has been left for us to discover the truth.

The biggest assumptions about Ancient Rome are all fabrications, based on nothing but twisted quotes from the ancient literature, and not supported by true archeological work. Be it the date of the destruction of Pompeii, the Roman sanitation systems or in this case the hypocausts, it's all made up.





> Note: This OP was recovered from the Wayback Archive.





> Note: Archived Sh.org replies to this OP: Roman Hypocausts are a myth


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## Sapioit (Sep 14, 2020)

It seems more likely that they were used to cool down places to lower than ground temperature. The stilts would serve as insulation, to reduce the amount of heat getting from the ground to the house, and air channels below the house and inside the walls would serve to first shade the underfloor area to lower air temperature, the walls would serve to funnel air into the entrance to the under-floor, the walls and floor would be cooled by the air, and the chimney pots would serve as a solar chimney to increase the speed of the air going out of the chimney. The darker colors of the chimney pots would absorb more sunlight and transform it into heat, with the metal ones being particularly good at transferring their heat to the air inside (and outside) them.




 



I anything, the place for setting up a fire would be the chimney tops, to create air suction from inside the walls and below the house, to feed the fire. I wonder if there are platforms inside the chimney near the top, where wood could be placed. Though setting a few hands of grass ablaze on top of the chimney would have an effect, as well, just a lot shorter-lived. Basically, like in some images showing the air flow, but without fire or with the fire inside the chimney pots or right on top of the chimney pots. 

But then again, maybe the air near the ground was hotter than the air a few meters above the ground, so a fire was used to pull air inside the from outside the chimney, to inside the chimney, to the walls, to the underground, then to the fire which pushed it outside the wall. This would require reversing the direction of air flow in the images showing the hypocausts' working mode.


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## _harris (Oct 4, 2020)

the concept of keeping the ground floor dry goes back many years and is very common...
most houses are built with some sort of air-gap between the ground and the actual floor, even basic old "workers" houses, where the construction quality is terrible, have this.

bearing in mind that very many contructions are not built on solid rock, it would make sense, that these "hypocaust" entrances would simply be a vent to keep an airflow around the whole house. effectively cooling the room in summer and stopping any moisture/damp from rising in winter! (also ground level is a lot colder than a raised platform in winter!)

even in winter in the UK, i've lived in victorian era terraced houses (they have "hypocausts"/ underfloor ventilation), and the wooden floors are not cold to walk on, especially compared with a concrete floor (in an extension for example).

	Post automatically merged: Oct 4, 2020



Sapioit said:


> View attachment 38


in this demonstration, most of the heat would absorb into the ground, the covering, and the walls of the house. and most of the remaining heat (with the smoke) would most likely take the easy route out.. up the stairs hehe... such an inefficient way to heat a space... and those romans certainly knew their shit, so this all seems quite an unlikely venture!


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## Glupsson (Oct 4, 2020)

Steam is a nontoxic way of transfering heat


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## Armouro (Oct 6, 2020)

The hypocaust seems like a neat idea until you get to the combustion issue, and the problems with sealing rooms and chambers. 
The koreans make use of the Ondol, and the radiant heat idea worked for them (still does) because they were able to seal their sub-floors so well. The tech is used even today, in some pretty fun ways. 

What strikes me, however, is the idea that the hypocaust "soot" issue is unresolved. Either there was no fire in those alcove at the edge of the structures and hypocausts are a myth indeed, or we are looking at an entrance and NOT seeing an insulated burn box somewhere. 
If indeed the soot issue is solved, then the rest of the idea would be sound, and I can only see one bit of simple technology that fits the bill.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater
There is the second idea, the insulatory nature of trapped or stagnant air; which may have been key in those homes and could explain the channels in the walls. 
But I think finding an insulated burn box is likely the only way the hypocaust could stand up to scrutiny.


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## Sapioit (Oct 7, 2020)

Armouro said:


> But I think finding an insulated burn box is likely the only way the hypocaust could stand up to scrutiny.



Rocket mass heaters work by creating a fire cyclone which to mix the unburnt fuel with unburnt oxygen, to burn more of the fuel, so the "smoke" is simply steam and CO2. As you said, without the firebox, we don't know what heated the rooms. Do keep in mind that some of the houses had a stove for cooking, and if you don't need more than one room heated, it's more than enough. Especially if the fireplace is located in the wall between the kitchen and bedroom, so when you cook you also heat the bedroom. But then again, we would need some research to confirm and deny the widespreadedness of this possibility. And I'm not going to research that, so feel free to do the research yourself, if you want to.



_harris said:


> the concept of keeping the ground floor dry goes back many years and is very common...
> most houses are built with some sort of air-gap between the ground and the actual floor, even basic old "workers" houses, where the construction quality is terrible, have this.
> 
> bearing in mind that very many contructions are not built on solid rock, it would make sense, that these "hypocaust" entrances would simply be a vent to keep an airflow around the whole house. effectively cooling the room in summer and stopping any moisture/damp from rising in winter! (also ground level is a lot colder than a raised platform in winter!)
> ...



Interesting. It makes a lot of sense, now that you mentioned it. I also thought of the possibility that they are for insulation from the cold, but quickly dismissed it due to the places where the hypocausts are found being in generally hotter climates. But now that I think about it, many of the hypocausts are in places which are very cold, and where it snows every winter, so it would makes sense that if they can insulate from the heat then they can insulate from the cold as well.

And that also explains why the towers below the tiles are so tall, since losing heat in cold winters is worse than gaining a bit more heat in the summers. And the openings are probably for insulation in the winter and natural draft (upwards or downwards, depending on if there is wind and in/from which direction it goes) in the summer and for the cats to be able to catch the rodents (mice, rats, etc.), lizards, and other unwelcome guests.

And the hypocausts could also be used in the winter as cold storage, being in contact with the ground. You just need a terracotta/pottery pot/container which can be sealed (unfired clay or even mud can be used for that), to keep the contents cool/refrigerated and safe from rodents and the like. Especially since some hypocausts have non-flat bottoms.

But back to heating, russian stoves, like bed-stoves in the east, also often have a sleeping place on top of it. It is especially useful since you don't need to heat more than the areas you will most often touch during the time you spend in the room. That means the bed, most of the time, since you will sleep there and can also simply spend the rest of your day on it for better comfort.

It's a cultural element present not only in Russia and East Asia, but also Eastern Europe. Even nowadays, the old houses which don't have the bed on the stove still have the bed right next to the stove, and the stove gets really hot during the winters. And thanks to the rocket-mass-stove, this architectural element is making a comeback in modern architecture.

Here are two articles talking in more detail about how things work nowadays, which mostly overlaps with the actual truth:
1. Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls
2. Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places

I did look into the most efficient pathways for normal terracotta/masonry stove/heater. But I lost the images due to a HDD failure.

 

I have archived the .mhtml (format for webpage saved as a single file) file of the mentioned webpages, since I cannot upload the .mhtml directly: 1, 2, 3, 4


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## Broken Agate (Oct 22, 2020)

dreamtime said:


> Big parts of Italy are free of forests nowadays.


 
The British Isles are largely free of trees, as well. Easter Island hardly has any trees. There are huge swaths of Earth's surface with not only the trees missing, but the other vegetation, as well. I think all these trees met the same fate that they do nowadays: the big ol'  logging industry got to them. Of course, that wasn't supposed to have existed back then, but that--combined with mass destruction by floods and advanced weaponry--makes a whole lot more sense than Romans burning all the trees to heat their homes.


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## Sapioit (Oct 22, 2020)

Broken Agate said:


> dreamtime said:
> 
> 
> > Big parts of Italy are free of forests nowadays.
> ...



Add to that a lot of things being made out of wood which rots (boats, water pipes which don't rot as long as they are kept soaking wet, etc.), and simply setting things on fire by cutting trees, letting them dry elsewhere then getting them back in the forests in a line perpendicular to the wind at that time of the year to start massive forest fires, and using bombs to fall trees then induced seismicity and soil liquefaction caused by it to get the logs covered in dirt, and you get the coal deposits which are so plentiful today and which have been used for arguably hundreds of years to generate power for industry. And that's only the things which are closest to the mainstream-accepted story.


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## anselmojo (Oct 23, 2020)

Sapioit said:


> Broken Agate said:
> 
> 
> > dreamtime said:
> ...



I whole-heartedly agree in general, but would posit that with easter island it was probably the rats eating the seeds and extirpating the native seed disperser of the giant palm trees, leading to a collapse of the mycorrhizal relationships in the topsoil, leading to land slides, internecine warfare, etc....


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## Sapioit (Nov 11, 2020)

anselmojo said:


> I whole-heartedly agree in general, but would posit that with easter island it was probably the rats eating the seeds and extirpating the native seed disperser of the giant palm trees, leading to a collapse of the mycorrhizal relationships in the topsoil, leading to land slides, internecine warfare, etc....


Or it might have been due to the (mainstream-accepted) people from the Eastern Island being taken as slaves at the time of the expansionist colonization done by the british, french, and spanish empies at the time, and subsequent wars which were fought to capture the people as slaves, leaving behind only the lucky few who managed to hide before the conquerors attacked. Or I might be thinking of a different island instead.


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## _harris (Nov 16, 2020)

easter island died out because it was much larger before the sea level rise!


Sapioit said:


> ...hypocausts could also be used in the winter as cold storage...


absolutely!!
ps- loved the use of "widespreadedness" not sure you'd find it in the english dictionary, but it's a perfect use of the language!!


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## Sapioit (Nov 17, 2020)

Dictionaries are used to catalogue words which are already in widespread use in mainstream media. For the words which aren't already in the dictionaries, words can be crafted, and linguists have a lot of historical accounts of how words are created, changed, forgotten, and replaced. Just look at how the meaning of the word "trump" changed in the last decade, and how many new words the internet has introduced in just the last 5 years alone.


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## Shikarihunter (Dec 4, 2020)

Conspiracy R Us referencing your work in his new video 

_View: https://youtu.be/qJFVyIVZ0sE_


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## Sapioit (Dec 6, 2020)

Shikarihunter said:


> Conspiracy R Us referencing your work in his new video


Great! The new site is getting some promotion. Too bad the other comments weren't mentioned at all.


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## dreamtime (Jun 7, 2022)

_Graphic by Andrew Collins. Source: Göbekli Tepe: Who Built It, When and Why - Graham Hancock Official Website_​
Andrew Collins writes:

_So what is Göbekli Tepe? Who created it, and why? More pressingly, why did its builders bury their creation at the end of its useful life_?​​These are the questions I ask in new book _Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, _in which I provide compelling evidence that the myths of the Watchers of the book of Enoch and the Anunnaki of Mesopotamian myth and legend are memories of the Göbekli builders and their impact on the rise of civilization. I believe also that Göbekli Tepe was constructed by a hunter-gatherer population still in fear following a devastating cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world – a comet impact that science today recognizes as having taken place around 12,900 years ago, with terrifying aftershocks that lasted for several hundred years afterward.​

At the end of 2021, a new archaeological site was presented by archaeologists in Turkey, located about 60km south of the well-known Göbekli Tepe. There are indications that it’s about cementing the myth of a Turkish advanced civilization, but even more problematic is that these findings are eagerly accepted and taken up even by alternative research, e.g. by Graham Hancock, ancient-oirigins.net, or the Youtube channel "Ancient Architects".

The older an archaeological site is said to be, the more uncritically the research is viewed in the alternative scene. Graham Hancock in particular has taken up "The hypothesis of the impact in the Younger Dryas". In his opinion it came approx. 12000 years ago to a comprehensive cataclysm by a comet impact, after which the survivors among other things built the place in Göbekli Tepe. In Göbekli Tepe he sees evidence of this post-cataclysmic civilization. Hancock and Collins never question the chronology given by mainstream researchers.

The finds in Turkey are completely exaggerated as a kind of birth of the primordial culture and civilization by Hancock:

"This was near the end of the last Ice Age, from which our world had been emerging into a pleasant warming phase, but the impacts set in train a kind of "nuclear winter" and plunged the planet back into a period of deep cold and darkness that lasted until around 11,500 years ago. It is this period of extreme cold that is referred to as the Younger Dryas (after a characteristic Alpine tundra wildflower, Dryas octopetala) but it is only now, with conclusive evidence of the comet impact, that we can be sure what caused it. (...)​​But there were survivors, who preserved at least some of the knowledge of the civilisation that had been destroyed with the intention of transmitting it to future generations, so it is not an accident that the first traces of the re-emergence of civilisation, in the form of the earliest known megalithic architecture and the re-promulgation of agricultural skills, occur at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey 11,500 years ago — a date that coincides exactly with the end of the Younger Dryas and the return to a more congenial global environment."​



 

 


_The pillars at Karahan Tepe, conveniently interpreted by archaeologists as "phallic symbols". I wouldn’t be surprised if the carved head is a modern forgery. __Source_​


The Roman Hypocaust​

_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sINoSihbpS0_​

The YouTube channel "Ancient Architects" has theorized that the columns at Karahan Tepe are the remains of a hypocaust. This consideration is more in line with the available evidence than the abstract theses of mainstream scientists and from Graham Hancock.

Archaeologists assume that these pillars are phallic symbols. Karahan Tepe, like Göbekli Tepe, is classified as a religious and cult site. Since both sites were found buried by earth/mud, archaeologists seriously assume that the inhabitants filled up the sites on purpose - for example for cultic reasons. The thesis of Göbekli Tepe as the site of a death cult was cemented by the discoverers around archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, without any scientific basis.

A 2020 study by the German Archaeological Institute concludes that important evidence questioning its purpose as a cult site has been ignored. Instead, there is evidence that these were normal dwellings where people lived:_ "The latest observations refer in particular to the existence of residential buildings and the collection and distribution of rainwater at Göbekli Tepe."_

These facts challenge the myth of primitive hunter-gatherers who, in addition to their primitive nomadic life, wasted all their resources on building losely defined places of worship, which, of course, they then proceeded to fill right back in. Even Hancock and co. don't seem to question that the inhabitants filled up the site voluntarily and left the area afterwards.

The phallic symbols in "Karahan Tepe" show similarities to the Roman hypocaust - about 9000 years before the first hypocaust systems supposedly existed.

Hancock rejects the phallic thesis, but remains within the framework of mythology:

There is a general assumption that the other pillars in the enclosure are phallic symbols and this may very well be true. However, consideration might usefully be given to an alternative possibility. Nearby Gobekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe’s famous “sister site”, has a very distinctive name, often translated “Potbelly Hill” but more accurately rendered as “Hill of the Navel”.​​This invites us to consider the possibility that Gobekli Tepe was recognised as an Omphalos or “Navel of the Earth”, a notion found at other ancient sites around the world (Delphi in Greece, Cuzco in Peru, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and Easter Island in the Pacific to name but a few) that are connected in myths and traditions to geodesy – the science of accurately measuring and understanding the Earth’s geometric shape and orientation in space. Could Karahan Tepe also have been one of these “navel” sites, and could the rock-hewn pillars represent not phalli but omphali?​
The consideration that these pillars had at least a somewhat more concrete meaning is in the right direction, but it is still far too abstract, considering that these pillars at Karahan Tepe look almost exactly like the archaeological finds in the Roman Empire, which are called "hypocaust systems".

As shown in the OP, hypocaust systems in the classical sense did not exist. Thus, there is no evidence that the hypocaust systems were used for heating, and firewood was burned.

But if the columns at Karahan Tepe had the same function as the supposed hypocaust systems in the Roman Empire, what exactly was the purpose of this structure?

Possibly these sites in modern day Turkey are not 12,000 years old at all, but also date from the Roman era - the only difference is that the sites in Turkey were more affected in the cataclysm that destroyed the Roman Empire some 500-700 years ago (see How Fake Is Roman Antiquity? (Part 1/3, Unz review)). Therefore, due to the greater destruction, more myths can be interpreted into the pillars at Karahan Tepe - in the case of Roman villas, the function is relatively clear as technical, even if archaeologists do not want to understand that they may have been ventilation systems rather than heating systems.

If Karahan Tepe and Rome perished at about the same time - and the similar construction of these "hypocausts" suggests that they did - then Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe were destroyed only in the last 1,000 years, and they were neither a "navel of the world" nor built by crazy Neolithic tribes who were incapable of building reasonable cities but spared no effort to chisel penis symbols into the earth over years of work and then promptly fill them up again.

As long as archaeological finds are mythologized by both mainstream researchers and alternative historians, it is impossible to truly understand where we come from and what sites like Göbekli Tepe really symbolize. In the minds of these mythologists, our Neolithic ancestors were obsessed with symbols and cults - all structures excavated were either temples, tombs, or something in between. No one seems to notice that this view ignores human nature. No civilization builds complex temples with no concrete function, but ignores basic human needs. Housing, roads, sewage systems, agriculture, livestock, money/trade, etc., are the basics. Only when the basics are covered do people begin to turn to spiritual aspects.

Just as with Göbekli Tepe (where only a paltry 1.5% of the site has been uncovered), only a fraction of the site at Kaharan Tepe is actually being uncovered. The goal is "conservation."

Lee Clare, a research lecturer at the German Archaeological Institute and coordinator at Gobeklitepe, also stressed that future digs will be limited in contrast to the large-scale excavations of years past.​​“Your readers should understand that archaeological excavation also means destruction,” he explained.​​“For this reason, it is important that everything is carefully documented before, during, and after excavation so that no information is lost in this process.”​
Turkey: Conservation, not excavation, focus in Gobeklitepe

This suggests that the point is not to actually uncover and study the sites at all - if they were, it would probably be recognized that they were simply normal old-world cities, with the normal infrastructure that cities have, and there would be many similarities with excavated cities from Western Rome.


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