Now a tunnel network has been uncovered beneath the historic heart of the Maltese capital of Valletta, researchers say. But the tunnels—likely from an ahead-of-its-time water system—may render previous theories all wet.

The newfound tunnels are said to date back to the 16th and early 17th centuries, when the knights—one of the major Christian military orders of the 11th- to 13th-century Crusades—fortified Valletta against Muslim attack.

The tunnels were uncovered on February 24 during an archaeological survey of the city’s Palace Square in advance of an underground-garage project.

“A lot of people say there are passages and a whole new city underground,” said survey leader Claude Borg of the Valletta Rehabilitation Project. “But where are these underground tunnels? Do they exist?

“We’ve now found some of them, at least.”

First Sign of Subterranean Valletta

Experts think the newly revealed tunnels—though tall enough to allow human passage—formed part of an extensive water system used to pipe vital supplies to the city.

The tunnels were found beneath Palace Square, opposite the Grandmaster’s Palace. Once home to the leader of the Knights of Malta, the palace today houses Malta’s legislature and the office of the Maltese president.

First, workers found what’s believed to have been an underground reservoir just under the paving stones of Palace Square.

Near the bottom of the reservoir, some 40 feet (12 meters) down, they discovered a large opening in a reservoir wall—the entrance to a tunnel, which runs half the length of the square and connects to channels, some of which lead toward the palace.

Efforts to follow these branches have so far failed, as they were blocked off at some later date, Borg said.

Restoration architect Edward Said, of the Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna (Malta Heritage Trust), describes the discovery as “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Said suspects the tunnels formed part of a state-of-the-art plumbing system, complete with ancient passageways for access and maintenance.

Thousand-Year-Old Fighting Force

Also known as the Knights Hospitaller and the Order of St. John, the Knights of Malta, established in 1099, gained a formidable military reputation as enemies of Muslims during the Crusades, a series of Christian military campaigns that originally had the goal of capturing Jerusalem.

(Related: ” Crusades, Islam Expansion Traced in Lebanon DNA.”)

In 1530 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V offered the knights the island of Malta for the princely sum of one falcon a year.

The Christian order, though vastly outnumbered by Ottoman Turks, triumphed in the Great Siege of Malta in 1565.

The experience, though, inspired them to found the fortress city of Valletta on a high peninsula that was secure but lacking in natural water sources.

Water security was a major priority during the city’s construction, the goal being to maintain the supply even during future sieges, according to Said.

“They soon realized that the rainwater and the wells they had were just not enough,” he said.

Water was therefore transported to the city from valleys to the west via an aqueduct, the remains of which still stand.

The Palace Square location of the newfound tunnels supports the idea that the network was intended for water, the team said.

The tunnel apparently fed a grand fountain in Palace Square via the underground reservoir. The fountain was later moved when the British ruled the island, from 1814 to 1964.

“This fountain marked the very important achievement of getting water to the city,” survey leader Borg said.

Centuries-old lead pipes and metal valves for operating the fountain have been found, according to Said. The tunnel’s connecting branches may have included service passages used by the Knights’ chief hydraulic engineer, or fontaniere.

“Together with his team, [the fontaniere] was in charge of monitoring and maintaining the fountains and conduits,” Said added. “They were also responsible for switching off the fountains at night.”

Knights of Sanitation

Other rumors of underground Valletta include a secret carriageway from the city to the palace of the Roman Catholic inquisitor—charged with rooting out heretics—under Valletta’s harbor.

Such tales of secret military passages have more solid foundations, according to Said, since underground passages do run beneath the battlements protecting Valletta’s landfront.

But Said suspects many of the subterranean legends spring from water-supply and drainage tunnels.

Valletta was hit by plague in the 17th century, when the 1340s Black Death epidemic still loomed in people’s minds, he said.

“They wanted to make sure this problem never happened again,” Said added.

In fact, the city’s plumbing system was highly advanced for the 16th and 17th centuries, he noted.

By comparison, major cities like London and Vienna “were still wallowing in their own muck.”

The Knights of Malta Today

In 1798 Napoleon banished the knights from Malta. Today, based in Rome but still called the Order of Malta, they are involved mainly in humanitarian enterprises.

Still, this month the Maltese government announced that, following the discoveries, the underground-garage plan has been shelved.

A new fountain, based on the original, is slated for the square, and Said is hopeful that the secret tunnels will eventually be opened to the public—one more reminder of the knights that still bear the island’s name.

Posted by James Owen for National Geographic.

INDIANA JONES, it is fair to say, would not approve. A small band of archaeologists are using Google Earth to make discoveries without getting their hands dirty. Although archaeologists have used satellite imagery for decades, the technique remained out of reach of most researchers because of the prohibitive costs and specialist skills needed to rectify distortions in raw satellite images caused by the angle of capture. But Google Earth, a free program that can be downloaded from the internet giant’s website, makes high-quality satellite images of much of the world’s surface available to anyone with a broadband connection. Archaeologists are now embracing the technology.

David Thomas, a graduate student at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, belongs to a team that launched a project called Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth (ASAGE) last year after plans for a survey near the Minaret of Jam had to be abandoned because of the continuing conflict in the region. He and his colleagues decided that making discoveries using computer mice, rather than shovels and trowels, would have to do instead.

“Realistically it is not possible for a Western field archaeologist to work in that area, and I can’t imagine it will be for the next 20 years,” says Mr Thomas. But, he says, studying images from Google Earth (pictured) “has the potential to enrich significantly our knowledge of Afghanistan’s archaeological remains, particularly in areas that are too large, dangerous or remote to survey from the ground.”

One aspect of the ASAGE project involved the use of high-resolution satellite images to catalogue the details of 463 previously unknown sites in the Registan desert, including mounds known as tepes (the remains of ancient settlements), hand-dug water channels and abandoned dams and reservoirs.

Little is known about the ancient history of the region, but nearby river valleys have been occupied for centuries, if not millennia. The Ghaznavids, who ruled over a large central Asian empire between the late 10th and 12th centuries, built intricate irrigation systems and established palaces, mosques and walled gardens at their winter capital of Bust and the surrounding settlements of Lashkari Bazar, on the east bank of the Helmand river.

Mr Thomas’s team, who displayed their results at the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin in July, produced plans of sites such as the medieval Islamic fort of Qal’a-i Hauz, believed to be a winter dwelling used by the Ghaznavid elite. The satellite images show evidence of structures that may have been hides used to hunt gazelle, and raised features that were probably used to manage water supplies. Basic plans of Bust were produced by French archaeologists in the 1970s, but the ASAGE researchers have compiled a more detailed plan showing the positions of residences, canals and walled gardens. They hope that providing details of their findings to Afghan archaeologists will enable them to protect some of the sites.

Although Google Earth can help make discoveries remotely in this way, other archaeologists are using it in the planning stages of their work, to identify places that warrant further investigation on the ground. Nico Tripcevich of the University of California, Berkeley, used the software to help with his research into the quarrying and trade of obsidian, a kind of volcanic rock used by pre-Hispanic peoples to make tools, weapons and decorative objects as early as 10,000 years ago. He used Google Earth to find tracks used to carry the rock, probably in llama caravans, away from a quarry site at Colca Canyon, at an altitude of 4,600 metres, in southern Peru. Linear features, such as Inca walls and roads, are easy to spot because they cut across natural features.

Mapping these routes has helped archaeologists reconstruct production and trade patterns, and hence economic, social and political relations in the region in the thousands of years before Europeans arrived. “Working at high altitude is exhausting, and you want to have a good idea of where you’re going to go before you set out,” says Dr Tripcevich. “Google Earth helps you make a short list of places to investigate.”

Jason Ur, an anthropologist at Harvard University, is using the software as part of his investigation of Tell Brak, a site in north-east Syria. It was one of the largest urban sites in northern Mesopotamia and is believed to have been settled as early as 6,000 BC. Dr Ur is using Google Earth to identify tracks and other linear features running away from Tell Brak, as part of his research into the mechanism of Mesopotamian city-formation.

“Google Earth gives you free access to imagery that would otherwise cost a fortune, and require specialist training to make use of,” says Dr Ur. And being able to pan and zoom the satellite images quickly makes it much easier to spot archaeological features and relate them to each other. “If you were to press your nose against an Impressionist painting, you would see colour and maybe elements of form, but it’s not until you pull back that these would turn into a bridge or water lilies,” he says.

But Dr Ur and others are aware that there could also be a dark side to Google Earth’s archaeological potential: looters could also use the software to find promising targets. “We cannot assume that all users who seek out archaeological sites are doing so out of a positive interest in antiquity,” says Dr Ur. So archaeologists should be careful about giving out precise co-ordinates, he says. “In the cases of unexcavated sites, the archaeologist’s mission might be to give the public a general idea of the extent of ancient settlement, without handing out a road-map that could be abused by looters.”

Source: Published in Economist. [link to original article]

Across the Pacific, in Micronesia, Hancock finds similar evidence of great astronomical knowledge, and he notes that the ancient builders had knowledge of the heavens that would also make them great navigators. What takes his theories to a whole new level of speculation, however, is when he uses computer graphics, showing the world as seen from the North Pole, to demonstrate that Easter Island is located equidistant in longitude between the Egyptian temples of Giza and the Cambodian temples at Angkor Wat. Doing some calculating on star positions in ancient time, Hancock makes the point that all these colossal and complicated structures must have been built at nearly the same time, about 10,500 B.C. Hancock’s theory that ancient mariners spread all this knowledge through the entire world may seem crazy at first, but he presents it in an entertaining manner, and even skeptics may enjoy his offbeat presentation.]

He also notes how the pyramid itself exhibits some sophisticated geometrical relationships that many scholars would credit to the theories of Pythagoras, who lived many centuries after the pyramid was built. In Central America, he discusses similar theories about Mayan pyramids and astronomy, and visiting the Hebrides, he ponders some unusual stone circles built near the North Atlantic. Hancock points out numerous relationships between these widely dispersed structures, and offers his conclusion that a civilization of ancient seafarers who lived around 10,500 B.C. were responsible for spreading the knowledge required to build them. This documentary, one of a three-part series called the Quest for the Lost Civilization is professionally produced, and Hancock’s theory, which at first sounds bizarre, is bolstered by his good-humored delivery and his constructive use of graphics to show relationships between ancient structures and their suspected astronomical models.

Based on the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, the Book of the Dead is a guidebook for the dead: a map of the afterlife that includes encounters with gods, demons and one’s own future parents at the moment of conception. Written in the eighth century, its description of the Tibetan afterlife bears an uncanny similarity to modern stories of the near-death experience.

Written by a mysterious Indian sage, the text was lost for centuries and kept hidden in the remote peaks of the Himalayas. Indeed, the book was not even translated into English until the twentieth century when it was proclaimed the ideal guide to the spiritual life by everyone from Carl Jung to Timothy Leary.

Interviews with Tibetan Lamas, American scholars, and practicing Buddhists bring this powerful and mysterious text to life. The programme culminates in a computer graphic recreation of the journey of the soul from death, through the terrors and trials of the afterlife, to rebirth into a new life.

The Incas ruled a land that most of which was made up of two parallel mountain ranges with high plateaus. Most of the land is 3,000 meters above sea level.

The Inca of Peru have long held a mystical fascination for people of the western world. Four hundred years ago the fabulous wealth in gold and silver possessed by these people was discovered, then plundered by Spanish conquistadors.

Cusco was the center of the Inca Empire, with its advanced hydraulic engineering, agricultural techniques, marvelous architecture, textiles, ceramics and ironworks.

How were the massive 200-ton limestone blocks lifted and stacked five high to build the Sphinx Temple? John Anthony West and a team of seismologists, headed by Boston University s Professor Robert Schoch, discovered a square cavity directly beneath one of the paws of the Sphinx.

According to the experts, it does not appear to be a natural formation. Could this be the Hall of Records of Atlantis? Includes the facts about this amazing mystery along with a fascinating series of spellbinding interviews with researchers, scientists and the best-known most credible ancient authorities in the world today.

And this video is not merely a visual montage of Egyptian images overlaid with mystical sounding rhetoric. This is real science and real history – and maverick archaeology at its best.

Skeptics may scoff, but Hancock earnestly points out similarities in giant stone structures in the Egyptian desert and Cambodian jungles, and on Easter Island and in Micronesia, he points out what he considers evidence of an ancient society of seafarers. His ideas may seem utterly bizarre at first, but Hancock presents them in an understated and good-natured manner, and he also makes clever use of computer graphics and aerial photography to illustrate the startling similarities in ancient structures found from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific. At times the three documentaries overlap, and at times they seem like one long program rather than three separate presentations. But throughout, Hancock raises some puzzling questions, and even if you don’t buy his arguments, bolstered though they are by mathematical equations and astronomical diagrams, the Quest for the Lost Civilization is an entertaining mixture of archaeology, astronomy, and speculation.

For many years, Angkor Wat was totally isolated from the World. Large, thick jungles covers the area, and it is located in the center of Cambodia. The French colonialists were the first westerners to get exposed to Angkor. They heard rumors from the local population about “temples built by gods or by giants.” Most of the colonialists referred these rumors to folk tales, but some believed that there really was a “lost city of a Cambodian empire”, which had once been powerful and wealthy.