Liquid Mercury Found at Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Serpent
Liquid Mercury Found at Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Serpent
"Gómez speculated to Reuters that the mercury could be a sign that his team is close to uncovering the first royal tomb ever found in Teotihuacan after decades of excavation – and centuries of mystery surrounding the leadership of the cryptic but well-preserved city.Except, there's something of a fly in the ointment, or rather, perhaps a whole lot of flies, and that is simply that no recovery of a "royal tomb" has yet been discovered "after decades of excavation." In other words, in site of all the archaeological theory about rituals and mirrors and divination, the key piece of evidence that would confirm these ideas is utterly missing. It's rather like that inconvenient fact that no "king" or "queen" was ever found in the "King's Chamber" and "Queen's chamber" in the Great Pyramid. Indeed, the names of those interior structures inside the Great Pyramid were chosen in deference to the reigning archaeological theory. It was a convenient way of stamping the theory onto the structure in the absence of evidence to support it.
"The mercury may have symbolized an underworld river or lake, Gómez postulated, an idea that resonated with Annabeth Headreck, a professor at the University of Denver and the author of works on Teotihuacan and Mesoamerican art.
"The shimmering, reflective qualities of liquid mercury may have resembled “an underworld river, not that different from the river Styx,” Headrick said, “if only in the concept that it’s the entrance to the supernatural world and the entrance to the underworld.”
“'Mirrors were considered a way to look into the supernatural world, they were a way to divine what might happen in the future,' she said. 'It could be a sort of river, albeit a pretty spectacular one.'
"Joyce said that archaeologists know that scintillation fascinated the ancient people generally, and that the liquid mercury may have been regarded as 'somewhat magical … there for ritual purposes or symbolic purposes.'
"Headrick said that mercury was not the only object of fascination: 'a lot of ritual objects were made reflective with mica,' a sparkling mineral likely imported to the region."
"An unpublished find on the fifth level (of the Pyramid of the Sun) has never been adequately explained. While the Sun Pyramid was first being probed by Batres in 1906, an archeologist working with him reported a thick sheet of mica covering the top of the fifth body. This material was apparently carried away during the course of the restoration.Tompkins is clearly implying, though stopping just short of explicitly stating it, that maybe the unusual presence of mica had less to do with presumed ritual, religious, or superstitous beliefs, and more to do with some unknown machine-like or scientific purpose. Given the huge redundant encoding of the mathematics of tetrahedral structures discovered at Teotihuacan by the American Harleston (documented at some length in Tompkins' book), one can only surmise that whoever built Teotihuacan had a thorough and sophisticated knowledge not only of astronomy but of mathematical structures, and this raises, to my mind at least, the possibility that a machine-like hypothesis for the Teotihuacan structures should at least be considered. At the very lest, the presence of mercury and mica, with their potential uses in nuclear technologies, should give even an archaeologist pause.
"Coincidentally, a 'Temple of Mica' was also found to the south of the Sun Pyramid about 350 meters down the Way of the Dead, where the local guard will still let one peek through a glass panel at the floor covered with mica slabs. Mica has two outstanding characteristics: high electrical resistance and opaqueness to fast neutrons. Hence it acts as as insulator or nuclear reaction moderator, which raises the question as to why two separate areas of Teotihuacan were covered with mica."(p. 202, emphasis added)
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