Ancient Places

As I write this in May of 2020, the annual travel season is upon us. There are travel guides on lots of subjects and locations. This book is kind of an unusual travel guide to ancient and (mostly) unusual sites in the USA. Most persons think that the United States doesn’t have much in the way of ancient ruins, and they would be wrong. There are amazing ruins all over the country, and some are not even accepted by conventional archaeology or anthropology as being real. These sites are fascinating and some are mysterious in terms of who built them and when?

Learn about the Seven Wonders of the World with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Twenty-five hundred years ago, people began to talk about the wondrous structures they had seen in their travels around the Mediterranean. In 222 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote an essay called "On the Seven Wonders".

The Hellenistic age brought a great deal of change in the ancient world. However, the era was destined to end in 31 BCE with the Battle of Actium. Octavian’s Roman forces defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic fleet, thus securing the rise of the Roman Empire. While the Hellenistic age lasted only for a brief period in humanity’s rich history, its influence on culture, science, and philosophy has resonated with the world ever since.

The supposed collapse of Roman civilization is still lamented more than 1,500 years later - and intertwined with this idea is the notion that a fledgling religion, Christianity, went from a persecuted fringe movement to an irresistible force that toppled the empire. The intolerant zeal of Christians, wrote Edward Gibbon, swept Rome's old gods away, and with them the structures that sustained Roman society. Not so, argues Douglas Boin.

Consider clues to ancient riddles and modern mysteries as you visit 4 of the Earth's most intriguing places. Travel to Atlantis, the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and the Bermuda Triangle. Mystic Places is based on the Time Life Books series Mysteries of the Unknown.

At a time in antiquity when most of Europe was covered with forests and wandering tribes, Mexico had already developed complex civilizations, beginning with the Olmecs and followed by the Maya, a civilization with advanced knowledge of medicine, engineering and astronomy. The Maya calculated the precession of the equinoxes and cycles of the Pleiades, on which they based their year, since they believed they had come from that constellation.