Ancient Flying Machines
| Daedalus flying machines | The helicopter | The Pacal's sarcophagus lid | Last Update:18/09/2001 |
Daedalus flying
machines
Air travel was the dream of humanity long before the Wright
Brothers made it a reality. But was it ever actually achieved?
New archaeological discoveries suggest, astoundingly that it
might have been, as much as 3500 years ago, and that the genius
who achieved it was a man long thought to have been purely
mythical - Daedalus, the architect of the notorious labyrinth of
Knossos, in Crete.
Pasiphae, wife the Cretan
king Minos, so the story goes, fell passionately in love with a
magnificent bull, pride of the the royal herds, and Daedalus
devised a machine to enable her to have her wicked way with it.
The monstrous product of this union was the terrifying Minotaur.
Minos ordered Daedalus to build the labyrinth, a tortuous
open-air maze, to hide it away and, to avoid the shameful secret
becoming known, imprisoned Daedalus in it as well, along with his
son Icarus who had helped him. But Daedalus collected feathers
and, fixing them to his arms with wax, made wings for himself and
Icarus, and they flew up and away. Icarus, in his excitement,
flew too near the sun; the wax melted and he plunged into the sea
to his death; but Daedalus flew on to Sicily, where he found
refuge at the court of the king of Syracuse.
(Click at the picture for full
size) (Picture : Daedalus, Pasiphae and wooden cow:
Pompeian wall painting (House of the Vettii), 1st cent. A.D)
Recently, excavating in Bronze Age deposits near Knossos, a Greek archaeologist, Professor Aphron Asophos, came upon some twisted metal objects which, when restored, were small, lightweight wheelless chariots, each with an elongated cone in front and aerodynamically extraordinarily sophisticated wings on each side. Scratched on the side of each was an inscription in the Minoan script, Linear B, which included the word DAIDALOW. Daedalus!
Incredible as it may be, Asophos reasoned, he had stumbled on first, proof that Daedalus had been a real person, not merely a figure in mythology; and, secondly, that he really had tried to build a flying-machine - and here, presumably, were the prototypes!
Later, an excavation in similar-aged deposits at Syracuse turned up a similar object. On learning of them Professor Asophos at once contacted the excavator, Dr. Sciocco Gabbante, and found that he had been puzzled by some odd inscriptions on them. Trembling with excitement, he flew to Syracuse and, yes, they were Linear B, and there was that name again: Daidalow. But the device itself was slightly different. Contacting an aeronautical engineering firm in Rome, Asophos and Gabbante learned with growing astonishment that this machine, unlike the others, was aerodynamically perfect - it really could have flown!
Forget feathers and wax: that was the only explanation that the amazed inhabitants of Knossos could conceive of, as they watched Daedalus and Icarus soar far about their heads. Deadalus had built a flying-machine, one which actually flew, and got him (but not, alas, his son) all the way to Sicily, back in the Minoan era, about 1400 B.C.
Only he knew the secret; when he died, a wealthy man, lionised by the Syracusan royal family who had even caused Minos to have an unfortunate fatal accident when the latter came in search of him, Daedalus took the secret of flight with him to his grave, not to be rediscovered for nearly three and half thousand years.
Or did he? Even if we discount the description of a flying machine in operation by the prophet Ezekiel, in about 600 B.C., as being just a vision in his head, what are we to make of the designs of flying-machines by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century? Some of them look, in retrospect, very like the devices from Knossos and Syracuse. Moreover in some newly discovered manuscripts, from the still under-researched archives of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Leonardo mentions Daedalus again and again alongside further sketches of his flying-machines. Had that phenomenal polymath independently invented similar devices or, more likely, did Leonardo have access to some now-lost documents, handed down from the Greeks through the Arabs to Renaissance Italy? Evidently he lacked - as we do - only knowledge of their motive power to make them fly once more?
Let history be the judge.
From the Canberra Times, 1 April , page 10, 'Flying in the
face of accepted wisdom', by Colin Groves.
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| The
helicopter Ancient Egyptian Seti I Temple at Abydos. |
The hieroglyphics shows? Images like modern vehicles: a helicopter, tank, jet aircraft. |
(Click at the pictures for full size)
The
airplane
Life after death at ancient Egypt. The mummy traveling to the
underworld on a solar bark.On the second column the same
hieroglyph image, airplane?
(Click at the picture for full size)
The bird
A small wooden artifact was found in the excavations around the
step pyramid of Saqqara in 1898 by the French archaeologist
Lauret. This piece was registered in the archives of the
Egyptian museum of Antiquities in Cairo as a
"Statuette of a bird". It was placed in the bird
section of the museum under the number 6347, and a little more
was thought of it for 70 years. The Egyptian Physician,
artist and aeromodeller Dr.Khalil Messiha rediscovered the
same artifact in the year 1969 in the museum. Dr. Khalil found
that this model differs considerably from other birds models in
that it was legless and had a straight tail and wings.Dr. Khalil
made a balsa wood model with the same measurements as the
Pa-Di-Imen artifact and added a stabilizer to the tail. the model
was pushed by hand and flew a few yards. Some call it a bird,...
but no birds with vertical tails were ever seen in Egypt on the
middle East.
The Pacal's
sarcophagus lid
The lid covers the sarcophagus of the Mayan king Pacal inside the
"Temple of Inscriptions", in the Maya city Palenque.
The lid is not the only richly decorated piece of stone that the
Maya left to us. The sarcophagus lid weighs as much as five tons
and the sarcophagus itself weighs in excess of fifteen tons.
Because of its enormous weight and size, it was set in place at
the base of the temple before construction began.
(Click at the pictures for full size)
The limestone sarcophagus
lid is carved with a scene of Pacal at the moment of his death.
He is shown falling down the World Tree into the jaws of the
Underworld. He is accompanied by an image of the head of a
skeletal monster carrying a bowl marked with the sign of the sun.
This sign indicates that Pacal would be reborn as a god by
defeating the Lords of Death who live in the Underworld.
Portraits of his ancestors can be seen around the four sides of
his coffin. Each figure is wearing a headdress symbolizing a
fruit tree. The lid is the a mysterious example of a flying or a
penetration machine ? the artist's fantasy ? or a secret meaning
through those images ? (For further analysis click this link for
a big size image : Sarcophagus
lid )
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