Who built the Longyou Caves 2000 years ago
The Longyou Caves are a group of artificial caves in eastern China in Longyou County, Quzhou Prefecture, Zhejiang Province. These caves were discovered as recently as 1992, and at that time they were completely filled with water. Apparently, this is why the interior decoration of the cave walls was so well preserved. When the water was pumped out, 24 large underground rooms with amazing wall decoration and beautiful bas-reliefs were revealed to people. Archaeologists date the beginning of the creation of the caves to the Qin period, that is, around 221 BC. However, this dating has caused a lot of controversy from the very beginning. The fact is that it was mainly determined by stalactite deposits, which can only give indirect indications of the time period. Other disputes arose due to the incredible decoration of the walls. The interior surfaces of the caves are covered with parallel stripes, running at an angle of about 60 degrees, and in many places they are so smooth (literally to the millimeter) that it is very difficult to believe that they were created by workers with ordinary chisels.
These stripes cover both the walls and the ceiling of the caves, and one can only imagine how difficult the manual work to create them was. And this is despite the fact that this rock is siltstone - not the hardest rock, but far from soft and quite difficult to process. Nowadays, similar symmetrical stripes in the rock are left by special machines. But what machines could we be talking about 2 thousand years ago?
Interview with Roman Kiselev, a specialist in mining and mining technologies.
The interview was conducted by Nikolai Subbotin, President of the Protoistoria Association.
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