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Day 4.1: The Lord of Death

She survives the fall, the chute catching on the undergrowth and swinging her against the sides of the enormous sinkhole.

She hangs there, catching her breath for a moment.

Then she sees it.

A doorway hewn into the rock, hidden for aeons by a crust of vegetation. Sunlight falls upon it, highlighting text carved into the lintel by an ancient mason. It has been long since erased, scrubbed out along with the history of this place.

But the meaning is clear: keep out or else.

Miami,

usa

Tomorrow, Sid and I will be heading to Caracas in Venezuela to join the Sarisariñama Expedition. Today, we remain here in Miami, chilling, resting and preparing for what will the adventure of a lifetime. As I’ve teased previously, this quest will take us thousands of miles and plunge us into the deadly heart of the Amazon rainforest.

So this seemed as good a time as any to explain where we are going and what we hope to achieve when we get there. I also thought you’d be interested to know a little about what drives a person to give up the comforts of home to go and spend six months camping on a table mountain in the rainforest! So I’ve broken today’s rather epic post into three smaller ones.

It seems only logical to start at the beginning. You probably saw on the news or social media that Kira Sharpe, the billionairess CEO of Sharpe Enterprises, decided to go spelunking, or sky diving or wing-suiting or something into the sinkhole on one of Venezuela’s famous table mountains.

Why?

I dunno. Because she’s rich and I guess that’s what gives rich people their kicks?

You’ve probably also seen the hype about the expedition, about how UNESCO got so excited that they immediately planned a multi-disciplined expedition to explore the underground ancient ruins that Sharpe found there. With a dollop of cash from Sharpe herself, of course.

What you probably don’t know so much about is why everyone got so excited about a bunch of tunnels boring their way into a giant slab of rock sitting about the jungle.

Recent discoveries have shed light on the ancient inhabitants of Amazonia, revealing them to be more sophisticated than anyone could have imagined.

The initial evidence from Sarisariñama supports these suggestions that state-level societies operated throughout the Amazon basin for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Indeed, the technological expertise required to scale the cliffs of a table mountain, climb down a sinkhole and then dig a series of tunnels into the heart of the mountain are unfathomable. The social implications are just as enormous – how did a society organise this? How did they transport the raw materials needed? How did they house the workers? Why did they do this in the first place? Was there a king or queen? A high chieftain? Priests? Was it an egalitarian society that thought, ‘hey, let’s do this thing for the good of all?’

Hopefully, we’ll find out.

But, on top of all that is another enigma – or two, depending on how you see their interconnectivity.

What we think we see at Sarisariñama suggests not just ancient Amazonian activity but some link to Mesoamerican and Andean cultures.

Mesoamerica is a term used to describe the myriad ancient cultures that spanned much of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. Most famous are the Olmec, the Toltec, the Teotihuacán, the Maya and the Aztecs.

The interconnectedness of these cultures, some of which co-existed while others were separated by vast distances or chunks of time, is the topic of hot debate.

Nevertheless, the ancient inhabitants of this vast area did share numerous traits, such as:

  • Monumental building
  • Hieroglyphic writing
  • Folded books or codices
  • A complex calendrical system
  • Knowledge of the movement of stars and planets
  • A ball game
  • Highly specialised markets
  • Human sacrifice – including self-sacrifice in the form of bloodletting from the tongue or penis
  • And elaborate religious and cosmological beliefs, all of which incorporate the idea of a universe orientated to the four directions (Coe 2011: 11-13).

The link between Mesoamerica and Sarisariñama is a single, faded hieroglyph on the lintel of the Labyrinth’s doorway.

It is the sole survivor of the erasure of a significant body of text that once decorated the entrance. Other than this one glyph, all that can now be seen are crude chisel marks from where someone tried to wipe all traces of this text from existence.

What does the hieroglyph mean?

I believe the two feet-like images are an epi-Olmec symbol that means ‘lord’.

The snake image could represent a river, perhaps, or the famous Feathered Serpent of various Mesoamerican religions such as Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan. This is possible and links to the ‘lord’ symbol that seems to be the primary focus of most scholars’ attention.

However, utilising the Universal Motif Language, I believe that, based on the deliberate destruction of the rest of the text, the serpent imagery is intentionally more apparent: it is a warning not to enter.

Something happened here.

Something so terrible that someone tried to erase all knowledge of the very existence of this place from the records.

I believe the serpent represents danger.

Death.

If the ‘feet’ translates to something like ‘lord’, then the hieroglyph’s meaning is obvious.

It reads as ‘The Lord of Death’.

I think the message is something along the lines of ‘Welcome to the House of the Lord of Death.’

Read in context with the erased history, with its deliberate destruction, I think we have on the doorway to Sarisariñama a warning.

Keep Out or Else.

If the doorway to Sarisariñama is of Mesoamerican design, what Kira Sharpe witnessed and photographed, stepping through it, is even more extraordinary.

“An eternal maze,” she described. “A seemingly endless labyrinth of tunnels, burrowing, at random, through the heart of the mountain.” In her brief, if illicit exploration of the ruins, she found nothing that could be described as a room or a chamber. Just tunnels. Endless tunnels and passageways, some coming to a sudden dead-end, others linking back to one another.

Amazingly, she isn’t still wandering through them, going slowly insane.

She also noted the uniformity of the tunnels. “The variation in height is minor,” she reported, “with an average height of just over seven-foot, at a guess, and an average width of just over four [feet].”

More striking, though, is her description of the tunnels’ construction technique: “It is as if the builders of this place were making a giant jigsaw puzzle. The walls, floor and ceiling, are all made from . . . I guess thousands, even tens of thousands of stones and rocks of all different shapes and sizes. Then they’ve slotted these rocks together without any cement or mortar, as far as I can tell. It’s just incredible.”

What’s incredible, though, is that she is describing something called cellular polygonal masonry. Not the most exciting term, I know, but I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures of it. The wall on Hatun Rumiyoc street in Cusco, Peru, is probably the most famous example. Particularly it’s ‘twelve angled stone.’

Some people even go so far as to call the building style simply ‘Incan’ or the slightly more descriptive ‘Incan wall.’ Just Google Incan wall, and you’ll get dozens of pictures.

It is a building style in which blocks of available stone were cut at seemingly random angles. But they fit one against the next so perfectly, so snuggly, that there was no need to use mortar or other bonding compounds to keep them in place.

To the eye, they are haphazard jigsaw puzzles of chaotic shapes and sizes. Yet, this technique has a seismic resistance unparalleled in the ancient world, allowing it to withstand even severe earthquakes. This has likely contributed to the survival of the tunnel system at Sarisariñama for untold centuries or more.

Of course, labelling it ‘Incan’ is incorrect as the Incas likely borrowed the style from the earlier Tiwanaku culture.

Like Mesoamerica, the Ancient Andeans were not a single, homogenous culture. They spanned an enormous stretch of the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Lowlands, from Columbia to the Atacama Desert. Notable ancient civilisations from the area include the Chavin, the Nazca, the Tiwanaku, the Musica, the Chimu and, most famously, the Inca.

So you see then the dilemma we face.

We can’t say the Incas built Sarisariñama. This is because we don’t know whether the Incas employed cellular polygonal masonry, copied the technique from another culture, or even just moved in and renovated pre-existing cellular polygonal masonry buildings. Nor did any of the ancient Andean cultures develop written text, like Mesoamerican hieroglyphics.

Yet, we can’t say the Mayans built Sarisariñama either. Like the Incas, the diffusion of Mesoamerican culture throughout Mexico and Central America is too complicated to pinpoint the origin of the single surviving glyph. More significantly, there is no evidence throughout Mesoamerica of cellular polygonal masonry.

So, once again, like the snaking, undulating tunnels that Kira Sharpe described burrowing through the mountain, we arrive back where we started.

Who built the ruins at Sarisariñama?

But now we have a few more questions.

Why did they build a labyrinth of tunnels in the middle of – what seems to us – nowhere?

And why did someone eradicate all knowledge of the place from existence?

Until now, it seems they succeeded. This leads me to wonder if the Lord of Death should be left in peace.   

Benjamin King

My name is Dr Benjamin King, and I am an archaeologist working on the UNESCO Sarisariñama Expedition. Join me on my epic journey to one of the most remote places on the planet – a tabletop mountain towering above the Venezuelan rainforest. This will be my home for six months as my colleagues and I attempt to unravel the mystery of the ancient ruins that lie buried within an enormous sinkhole. Not only do I blog updates about the project, but also the trials and tribulations of life in the jungle. Something tells me that the danger of the jungle’s predators is nothing compared to the perils of being trapped with the same group of people for the next six months! Don’t miss out on a single moment of this extraordinary adventure - follow me on social media @benking1209 Benjamin King is also the fictional hero of the action-packed adventure series ‘The Xibalba Saga’ by James Richardson. Read it now https://amzn.to/3dD9wZW Stay up to date on new releases and exclusive free content at www.moonmask.net and @worldofmoonmask

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