Most people don't realize how mysterious the Pyramids truly are.
They're so old that Cleopatra lived closer to us than to their construction — yet Khufu's Pyramid is so precise it aligns north within 1/20th of a degree.
Some more mind-blowing facts about them… 🧵
They're not just incredibly old, but impossibly precise.
The Great Pyramid (attributed to Khufu, c.2550 BC) is 3.4 arcminutes off perfect alignment with true north. That's precision of ~1 millimeter per meter of the length of its base.
Executing such accuracy on something with a 13 acre footprint is astounding — how did they do it?
Possibly with the help of the sun on the equinox, which on that day rises exactly in the east (and sets perfectly in the west)...
This 2,700-year-old tablet is the oldest map of the world.
It reveals just how differently the ancients understood the world — but one detail is particularly strange.
It sheds light on a VERY ancient story… (thread) 🧵
The "Imago Mundi" is the oldest map of the world — as it was known to the Babylonians around 700 BC.
It's carved into a small piece of clay, with annotations explaining it, and the creation myth of the world.
The central parts of the map are easy to read:
The Euphrates river runs north to south, straddled by the city of Babylon (modern-day Iraq), and surrounded by cities and regions marked by small circles.