Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Biggest pyramid: Bosnia, Indonesia, Mexico?


We all "know" the world's largest pyramid is in Cairo, Egypt, at Giza. But that's wrong, and no one says that but popular. The world's largest officially recognized pyramid (not tallest but largest) is a massive structure that size of a small mountain in Cholula, Mexico, at the ruins of a Mesoamerican archeological site the Spanish Catholics tried to bury it, literally. It is so massive that to hide it, they threw mud and dirt all over it and built a Catholic church on top. Oddly, the same thing was done by Muslims as Islam conquered Java, Indonesia, and could not believe the advanced architecture of a massive Buddhist pyramid now called the Borobudur Buddhist temple. It is the size of a hill. Unable to replicate it, move it, or destroy it even though it used no mortar but was fitted together with precisely cut stone blocks, Islamic conquerors simply buried it in mud and soil. It remained lost until centuries later a British surveyor inspected the site and realized that that hill should not be there. He climbed it, dug a bit, and found the magnificent structure. It was excavated and stands as the largest Buddhist temple in the world. (It pales in comparison to the square mile of the unexcavated Mes Aynak Buddhist temple complex in ancient Gandhara, modern Afghanistan, that is a gold and copper mine full of rare earth minerals and leased by the Chinese who would have razed it for its mineral treasures had it not been that metal prices tanked on the world market before it could begin its destruction. The USA left Afghanistan so devastated that it is understandable that Muslim Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world at the time, accepted much-needed foreign currency and capital infrastructure investments. The Chinese built a town and a railroad at Mes Aynak for the resource extraction, and now they are only waiting for the world to need more cell phones and electronics to drive the price up. Apparently, Russia or some industrial concern discovered pellets of rare earth minerals littering the nearby seafloor. But Indonesia boasts a much larger and older pyramid, one the size of a mountain. It is disputed, in spite of the cut stones littering the area, with geologists and archeologists speculating that it has to be a natural formation because, who could have built such an ancient and massive structure. But there it is.

It may be comparable in size and age to the discovery in Bosnia with its Pyramid of the Sun and Moon and other, like Mexico's undisputed grand boulevard of pyramidal temples in Mesoamerica.

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