The ancient ruins of a massive city located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean have been spotted by satellite images.
The ruined city is one of today’s great archaeological enigmas and is referred to as “Atlantis,” the “eighth wonder of the world,” or the “Venice of the Pacific.”
According to experts, we could be looking at the remnants of a long lost ancient civilization or at least one we’ve not heard much about.
Some even say it was one of the many cities belonging to the mythical Lemurian empire.
The Science channel has revealed new images of an ancient city composed of hundreds of islands separated by water channels near the city of Nan Madol, on Pohnpei Island, Micronesia.
It was inhabited by a civilization of which hardly anything is known.
Some even ventured out as far as to call this long-lost civilization, the remains of Atlantis, although the lost Lemurian empire would be a more suitable guess. Anyway, both of them are a myth, so it’s likely that the ancient city—Nan Madol—was the capital of the Saudeleur Dynasty.
The Saudeleur Dynasty was the first organized government that managed to unite the people of Pohnpei island.
The island where the discovery took place is one of the most remote in the Pacific Ocean and is located 2,500 km from Australia.
According to researchers, the name ‘Nan Madol’ means ‘space in the middle’, which could refer to the structure by which the city is divided: water channels separated by totally geometric blocks.
It’s a wonder of ancient engineering and terraforming.
Thousands of years ago, the island was inhabited by an ancient Asian civilization of which hardly anything is known.
“Why would someone build a city in the middle of the ocean so far from any other civilization?” Asks archaeologist Patrick Hunt.
“When we looked at the blocks from the air we were impressed, but we were even more impressed when we saw them on the ground. The blocks have a height of 7 meters and a width of 5”, adds archaeologist Karen Bellinger.
Last year Mark McCoy, an anthropologist and associate professor at the Southern Methodist University in Texas, led an investigation to determine the origin of the mysterious city.
Fin order to understand everything possible about the ancient site, researchers analyzed a piece of coral found in the tomb of the first chief of the city, which allowed scientists to date the construction between 1800-1200 AD.
According to McCoy, the structures at Nan Madol are at least a hundred years older than the rest of similar buildings on the Pacific islands.
The study also revealed that Nan Madol was an old administrative center on the island of Pohnpei. Built on 83 hectares of lagoon with artificial islands, its architecture is based on basalt and coral columns.
“For me, at its best, Nan Madol was the capital of the island,” McCoy said. “It was the seat of political power, the center of the most important religious rituals and the place where the old rulers of the island were buried,” he explains.
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