The Mystery of the Kailasa Temple of India | Ancient Architects

The enigmatic Kailasa Temple at the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra, India has fascinated researchers for centuries. As the world’s largest monolithic structure, it is without doubt one of the most breathtaking sites on the planet.

It is often overlooked, or at least overshadowed by sites such as the Giza pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge of England, the Mexican Pyramid of the Sun, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and so on, but this is certainly one of humanity’s greatest architectural achievements.

All images are taken from Google Images for educational purposes only.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WypT8RPUxg

im always fascinated by this temple, there is no way man could have built it, even in modern times its impossible to accomplish such a feat, straight aligned hallways error proof carvings, should be among the wonders of the world

this is a master piece. No room for error at all, imechogwa kutoka kwa mawe. the indian subcontinent was were the action was, many years ago.

The Oldest Stunning ancient step-well in Rajasthan - Chand Baori

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPv9RXJzPNo

those guys invented the concept of zero, algebra, trigonometry, decimal system and quadratic, lengths and weights, geometry, infinite series way before Newton etc way before Europeans did. They also used negative numbers in a time when European mathematicians did not accept them. We are just always told about european and american inventors

before the NAZI took power in Germany, they spent lot’s of time in India and the Surrounding areas in the Himalayas , from there, Germany revolutionized technology. Just wondering what info they got from there.

How were these built? No one knows

Wow, this is amazing stuff! Though there is a similar monolithic church in Lalibela, Ethiopia

If i had a one way time machine, the past is where I would go, no doubt about that!

i dont refute any of your claims but the real question is who are “those guys” and why it hasnt been replicated again, my sentiments are usually unconventional but i believe this was not created by man but by an advanced lost civilizations,
this guy explores them and create good content here is his take which i agree 100%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Jl4HNDixc

something, and a truly bad thing must have happened, if they were this advanced way back na sasa illiteracy huko ni kubwa, basic hygiene ni shida, poverty shida, violence against women shida - zero innovation after that period. Something must have happened.

Indians are the best in Med and IT. Just go to USA uangalia most doctors and IT ni kina nani.

Google and Microsoft CEO are all Indians

I think colonialism messed up lots of these innivative civilisations. China, mali, benin, india. For some it completely ruined them eg Africa and south america, for others it just slowed them down eg china and India.

Wacha nikutafutie benin wall which was only second to great wall of China but was destroyed by the British. Benin was the best designed city in the world. Far better than London. It even had street lights. The mathematics used to design the city had not even been discovered by the Europeans.

You are so mistaken, this structures were not built by the people that live in those area today. Some of written stone tablets discovered in egypt cannot be read by egyptians. Meaning pyraminds were not built by egyptians. These structure are about 6 millions years old, built by people who were totally different. We will also will be harvested an leave earth unhabited, maybe for millions of years. Then another adam and eve will be brought to populate the earth again. They will be seeing structures we are building and start guessing what happened.

On the benin story here is a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc0fNOPlbdo

If you want to read a detailed description here you go

This is the story of a lost medieval city you’ve probably never heard about. Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century.

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”.

Situated on a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls in the south and deep ditches in the north. Beyond the city walls, numerous further walls were erected that separated the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages.

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.

Barely any trace of these walls exist today.

View along a street in the royal quarter of Benin City, from 1897.
View along a street in the royal quarter of Benin City, 1897. Photograph: The British Museum/Trustees of the British Museum
Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace.

When the Portuguese first “discovered” the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the middle of the African jungle. They called it the “Great City of Benin”, at a time when there were hardly any other places in Africa the Europeans acknowledged as a city. Indeed, they classified Benin City as one of the most beautiful and best planned cities in the world.

In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket”.

African fractals
Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

A plaque showing an entrance to the palace of the Oba of Benin.
A plaque showing an entrance to the palace of the Oba of Benin. Photograph: Alamy
At the centre of the city stood the king’s court, from which extended 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120-ft wide. These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water. Many narrower side and intersecting streets extended off them. In the middle of the streets were turf on which animals fed.

“Houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other,” writes the 17th-century Dutch visitor Olfert Dapper. “Adorned with gables and steps … they are usually broad with long galleries inside, especially so in the case of the houses of the nobility, and divided into many rooms which are separated by walls made of red clay, very well erected.”

Dapper adds that wealthy residents kept these walls “as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland can be made with chalk, and they are like mirrors. The upper storeys are made of the same sort of clay. Moreover, every house is provided with a well for the supply of fresh water”.

Family houses were divided into three sections: the central part was the husband’s quarters, looking towards the road; to the left the wives’ quarters (oderie), and to the right the young men’s quarters (yekogbe).

Daily street life in Benin City might have consisted of large crowds going though even larger streets, with people colourfully dressed – some in white, others in yellow, blue or green – and the city captains acting as judges to resolve lawsuits, moderating debates in the numerous galleries, and arbitrating petty conflicts in the markets.

The early foreign explorers’ descriptions of Benin City portrayed it as a place free of crime and hunger, with large streets and houses kept clean; a city filled with courteous, honest people, and run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy.

What impressed the first visiting Europeans most was the wealth, artistic beauty and magnificence of the city

The city was split into 11 divisions, each a smaller replication of the king’s court, comprising a sprawling series of compounds containing accommodation, workshops and public buildings – interconnected by innumerable doors and passageways, all richly decorated with the art that made Benin famous. The city was literally covered in it.

The exterior walls of the courts and compounds were decorated with horizontal ridge designs (agben) and clay carvings portraying animals, warriors and other symbols of power – the carvings would create contrasting patterns in the strong sunlight. Natural objects (pebbles or pieces of mica) were also pressed into the wet clay, while in the palaces, pillars were covered with bronze plaques illustrating the victories and deeds of former kings and nobles.

At the height of its greatness in the 12th century – well before the start of the European Renaissance – the kings and nobles of Benin City patronised craftsmen and lavished them with gifts and wealth, in return for their depiction of the kings’ and dignitaries’ great exploits in intricate bronze sculptures.

“These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique,” wrote Professor Felix von Luschan, formerly of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. “Benvenuto Celini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him. Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”

A drawing of Benin City made by a British officer in 1897.
A drawing of Benin City made by a British officer in 1897. Illustration: akg-images
What impressed the first visiting Europeans most was the wealth, artistic beauty and magnificence of the city. Immediately European nations saw the opportunity to develop trade with the wealthy kingdom, importing ivory, palm oil and pepper – and exporting guns. At the beginning of the 16th century, word quickly spread around Europe about the beautiful African city, and new visitors flocked in from all parts of Europe, with ever glowing testimonies, recorded in numerous voyage notes and illustrations.

Lost world
Now, however, the great Benin City is lost to history. Its decline began in the 15th century, sparked by internal conflicts linked to the increasing European intrusion and slavery trade at the borders of the Benin empire.

Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground. My great grandparents were among the many who fled following the sacking of the city; they were members of the elite corps of the king’s doctors.

Nowadays, while a modern Benin City has risen on the same plain, the ruins of its former, grander namesake are not mentioned in any tourist guidebook to the area. They have not been preserved, nor has a miniature city or touristic replica been made to keep alive the memory of this great ancient city.

A house composed of a courtyard in Obasagbon, known as Chief Enogie Aikoriogie’s house – probably built in the second half of the 19th century – is considered the only vestige that survives from Benin City. The house possesses features that match the horizontally fluted walls, pillars, central impluvium and carved decorations observed in the architecture of ancient Benin.

Story of cities #4: Beijing and the earliest planning document in history

Curious tourists visiting Edo state in Nigeria are often shown places that might once have been part of the ancient city – but its walls and moats are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps a section of the great city wall, one of the world’s largest man-made monuments, now lies bruised and battered, neglected and forgotten in the Nigerian bush.

A discontented Nigerian puts it this way: “Imagine if this monument was in England, USA, Germany, Canada or India? It would be the most visited place on earth, and a tourist mecca for millions of the world’s people. A money-spinner worth countless billions in annual tourist revenue.”

Instead, if you wish to get a glimpse into the glorious past of the ancient Benin kingdom – and a better understanding of this groundbreaking city – you are better off visiting the Benin Bronze Sculptures section of the British Museum in central London.

https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

A ted talk in African fractals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n36qV4Lk94

Fractal mathematics which is credited to IBM research Benoit Mandelbrot was widely used in Benin and in most African villages way before europeams. Currently it has many practical uses, too - for example, in producing stunning and realistic computer graphics, in computer file compression systems, in the architecture of the networks that make up the internet and even in diagnosing some diseases.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11564766

https://narrativelab.co.za/the-power-of-african-fractals/

Civilizations get attacked, people get killed or slaved in the process and the knowledge dies. A good example is the Benin of Nigeria that I just showed you up there

lol, ancient humans were intelligent too and knew how to do maths and geometry.

kweli kabisa, if it’s not in Europe or by people of European descent… they claim it’s definitely aliens! Yet there is ample evidence showing how even the Ancient egyptians had an understanding of Geometry, project management, advanced mathematics and astronomy. They knew where North and South is before the Europeans did.

Fascinating shit

Spectacular