
A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain - Cozumel
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160812-the-giant-pyramid-hidden-inside-a-mountain
======
goldscott
I was here back in February. You can walk through some of the excavated
tunnels, but most are closed off.

Wikipedia has a good image showing the sizes of different pyramids compared:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparis...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparison_of_pyramids.svg)

Note that Cholula has the largest base, but isn't the tallest.

~~~
Houshalter
Tangent: that's really cool that wikipedia has interactive graphics and not
just static images. In fact, and maybe I'm stupid, but I had no idea that svgs
could be interactive until this moment. I thought they were just a vector
image format.

~~~
adrusi
They aren't interactive, but since their XML can be directly embedded in an
HTML document they can be manipulated through the DOM.

~~~
CydeWeys
It is interactive. Hovering over different pyramids fills in the shape of just
that pyramid, and you can interact with any of them by clicking on it to bring
you to the Wikipedia article on it.

I too didn't realize that this was possible in SVGs. It's awesome.

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scirocco
This is pretty common in Mexico. Go to the Mayan village of Coba on the
Yucatan Pensinsula and you will see hundreds of small mountains. What used to
be pyramids, are now hills as trees and bushes have grown through them. When I
was there some years ago they told me only 5-10% have been restored and made
back into pyramids. It's an extremely time-consuming process involving large
teams to ensure each brick is put back into the right place. Most times you
just see a pile of bricks with no sign of a pyramid structure.

~~~
fennecfoxen
I was in Lima recently, and there was a ruin right in the nice Miraflores area
(with plenty of high-rises) that had been a temple complex of some sort. Where
they hadn't excavated, the outer layer of brick had just crumbled to dirt, and
looked like nothing special. Apparently _part_ of the temple complex had been
leveled and used as a soccer field as recently as the 1980s.

~~~
jandrese
Even the structures built from stone were dismantled for the materials over
the years. It's why Machu Picchu is such an amazing find--the locals didn't
know about it and thus didn't tear it apart over the centuries. Compare this
to grand sites like Saksaywaman that were picked apart down to the foundation
by people looking for building material.

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kranner
> Within three hours they had murdered 3,000 people. October 12th 1519 was a
> bloodbath on an unprecedented scale...

Not in global terms. Genghis and his Mongol army allegedly despatched up to
hundreds of thousands to over a _million_ people each in campaigns such as in
Nishapur, Merv and Urgench, in the 13th century.

~~~
overcast
In three hours?

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duaneb
It would absolutely shock me if they didn't exceed 1k/hr at times. Nobody
really did what Ghengis did again, thank god.

~~~
overcast
That's some serious APM.

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jpea
Arms per minute?

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jdmichal
"Actions per minute". It's a metric used in competitive gaming to describe how
many actions a player can dispatch.

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hackaflocka
I just want to clarify that we are talking about mass here. In terms of
height, it's much much lower than the pyramids in Giza.

When I first heard about that pyramid, I was a little confused because it took
me a while to realize this.

~~~
cpncrunch
No not mass. Volume and base area.

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ap3
\- the pyramid in Chichen Itzá (mayan) also has a smaller pyramid inside

\- the spanish continuously built church temples on top of the natives'
pyramids. Like a cruel switch of religions. The Mexico City Basilica sits on
top of aztec ruins.

~~~
snovv_crash
Similar thing happened in Rome: the marble from the Colleseum was stripped and
used to build St Peters.

~~~
toyg
That is just about reusing materials, something very common back when
producing such materials was very expensive.

Constructing religious buildings on top of pre-existing ones, or repurposing
them, is about signalling evolution and domination, about co-opting
sensibilities. Christian basilicas in a lot of cases were born as Roman civil
buildings, altered to suit the new religion; Hagia Sophia, the Pantheon and a
number of other religious buildings were "switched" between religions at
various points; and it's fairly common for churches to be built on top of
"pagan" shrines.

It's like religious festivities "curiously" overlapping pre-existing
celebrations, or saints exhibiting characteristics typical of other faiths:
one way for new cults to achieve legitimacy is by repurposing existing
elements and claiming they fit a grand scheme from the beginning. In a way,
both Christianity and Islam do it right from their holy texts.

~~~
Someone
_" Constructing religious buildings on top of pre-existing ones, or
repurposing them, is about signalling evolution and domination"_

It also may be cheaper to build on top of an existing foundation, or the
location an existing church stands on simply may be one of the few locations
one can build a heavy building on. In some regions (e.g. peat areas) solid
ground or even ground that is solid less than ten meters below ground level
can be hard to come by.

~~~
dalke
While it may also be that, toyg's point about 'evolution and domination' is
the primary reason.

For example, "The location of Viracocha's palace was chosen for the purpose of
removing the Inca religion from Cusco, and replacing it with Spanish Catholic
Christianity." \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cusco_Cathedral#Basilica_Cathe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cusco_Cathedral#Basilica_Cathedral_of_our_Lady_of_Assumption)

See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianized_sites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianized_sites)
.

~~~
jomamaxx
I would agree with the comments that the locality was chosen for political,
not so much pragmatic reasons regarding construction. It would have been
important for them to send a signal that the 'old gods' were not important,
and there was 'a new order'.

But again context: from antiquity to the modern era, when civilizations clash,
one dominates the other and you don't get just 'parts' of the new
administration. You get agriculture, domestication of animals, the new
science, literacy, 'medicine', ideas, civil administration and religion. Not
just one thing. And by this time Christianity and Buddhism also represented a
huge step forward in metaphysical though vis-a-vis polytheistic and animist
religions previous to them. People forget that religions are not 'arbitrary'
\- they represent the metaphysical thinking of the era. Religions in the
Common Era were often founded with moral principles regarding good behaviour,
charity, selflessness etc., as opposed to thinking of 'those above' as merely
a soap-opera of superhuman like people, with human like characteristics, as in
many of the pre-Common Area faiths. I'm not advocating it, I'm describing the
context.

My family members go down to Central America every year to help build homes.
I'll bet in 200 years, academics of the era will look upon that as some kind
of 'cultural destruction' as well (i.e. putting people into brick homes
instead of 'native huts') - but again I think that description would lack
context. We look at history through our own cultural order, which is I think a
problem sometimes.

~~~
dalke
The context is ap3's comment: "the spanish continuously built church temples
on top of the natives' pyramids. Like a cruel switch of religions. The Mexico
City Basilica sits on top of aztec ruins."

snovv_crash believed it was similar to reusing marble from the Coliseum to
build St. Peter's.

toyg pointed out that why it isn't similar.

User 'Someone' thought reuse was more to do with pragmatism.

I reaffirmed that it was deliberate Spanish/church practice. (Other religions
do the same: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_non-
Muslim_place...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_non-
Muslim_places_of_worship_into_mosques) )

I fail to see the need for a larger context, at least not when it contains so
many topics which have nothing to do with the given thread, and with flamebait
topics like the proposition that Jesus was not a "superhuman like" person who
could perform miracles and walk on water, or that Muhammad did not split the
moon.

~~~
jomamaxx
???

\+ We're talking about where and why the new temples were built. 'Why' there
were built there is a pretty important part of the overall question.

\+ My proposition was to support the theory that they were built there for
geopolitical reasons, not architectural reasons, and I gave some reasoning
behind why this was - and to contextualize the misplaced statement regarding a
'cruel switch of religions'

\+ You're not reading my comments regarding religion correctly - they are an
historical articulation of the social development of religion based on
evolving metaphysical premises, specifically from pre-Common Era polytheistic
faiths to Common Era faiths, and it has nothing to do with what 'magical'
those people happen to believe.

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ekianjo
Its not the largest man made monument. Kofun are bigger
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kofun)

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DAddYE
I watched the tunnels found recently under it in "Expedition Unknown - Lost
Mexican City". They're stunning!

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b34r
I think I remember reading a fictional book about this. Something about the
pyramid being a necropolis and there being a machine taking you up to a
different area that was supposed to be the "heaven" in the duality. Alien God
thing with blue skin... I think it was related to the "Excavation" series.

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jamilaliahmed
This is some new and useful info. All my life i thought Egypt had the largest
Pyramid.

~~~
quantumhobbit
The Egyptian ones are still the tallest. This one has a wider base.

~~~
impe83
Oh got it, thanks for the clarification!

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insulanian
> ... it’s the largest pyramid on the planet...

There seem to be the larger one in Europe - Bosnia:
[http://piramidasunca.ba](http://piramidasunca.ba)

~~~
roywiggins
The claims are... controversial, to say the least, and probably bunk.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims)

"He believes the Mesoamerican pyramids and Egyptian pyramids are built by the
same people as the Visočica hill... Osmanagić wishes to excavate in order to
"break a cloud of negative energy, allowing the Earth to receive cosmic energy
from the centre of the galaxy""

~~~
ebcode
ad hominem. don't shoot the messenger...

~~~
roywiggins
The wikipedia article contains plenty more attacking the content of his
assertions, including this letter:

"We, the undersigned professional archaeologists from all parts of Europe,
wish to protest strongly at the continuing support by the Bosnian authorities
for the so-called "pyramid" project being conducted on hills at and near
Visoko. This scheme is a cruel hoax on an unsuspecting public and has no place
in the world of genuine science."

His gobbeldegook about cosmic energy is a lot more fun and a shorter quote, so
I went with that instead.

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whamlastxmas
It's depressing when even the BBC is full of click bait and contentless
garbage: [http://i.imgur.com/n482Pze.png](http://i.imgur.com/n482Pze.png)

Two or maybe three are fine. The rest is total shit, though.

