5 More Ancient Mysteries We Still Haven't Solved

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[BellePullman]

I'd be interested to see the flip side of this - the long-standing mysteries, the theories that came up, and the more recent accepted facts explaining what actually happened. What crazy ideas were believed before a modern answer was found? ... and do those facts then influence how we look at unsolved mysteries?

[ignitionfrn]

0:55 - Chapter 1 - The death of cyrus the great
4:00 - Chapter 2 - The disappearance of abu bakr II
6:30 - Chapter 3 - The voynich manuscript
8:50 - Chapter 4 - The olmec colossal heads
11:10 - Chapter 5 - The mary celeste

[WILD__THINGS]

I love how much Simon has loosened up over the years and really lets his personality shine now.

[DungeonDragon]

The theory I heard about the Mary Celeste is that you're supposed to open the cargo hatches regularly when carrying denatured alcohol, to prevent the fumes from building up. But the weather had been so bad during the voyage that they had to keep all the hatches closed to prevent the rain from flooding the ship, so when they finally had the chance to air out the hold, the fumes were so bad that the crew was having a hard time breathing. So they decided to pile into the life boat, and hang out at the end of the tow line until the fumes cleared out, but then either the line broke or the life boat capsized, and they all drowned.

[butwhataboutdragons]

In reading about the Mary Celeste, I really like Channel 5's experiment. Alcohol CAN burn without actually burning anything around it, and if some fumes went up in an explosion, it's easy to imagine the crew being scared out of their minds and flying into a panic, not knowing they're not actually in real danger since those fumes burn off instantly. All they know is that they hear a huge THOOM sound or whatever, and see a wave of fire, and they run for the lifeboat.

[mikes]

Glad to see you, Simon. It's been a couple of hours. I was worried something had happened you.

[joseybryant]

Gibberish or not, the monk that made it did an exceptional job. The penmanship is beautiful, as are the illustrations.

[anthonyowens]

When the cargo of the Mary celest was examined there was one empty barrel, which means that it was leaking. By the time it had drifted to Gibraltar, all the alcohol had evaporated, but you can imagine the powerful stench of alcohol on the ship at the time of its leaking, combined with the fact that it was packed amongst many other alcohol fired barrels, the crew wouldn't have known how many were leaking and would have been terrified that the slightest spark, which is very common, could have caused an explosion. It can be reasonably deduced that the crew decided to leave the main boat given the alcohol leak and the very high risk of fire /explosion. I also think I read that there was a rope attached to the ship trailing behind as if they'd meant to tether themselves on but got detached somehow.

[JSReaL]

Simon in most channels: "Second part because you liked the first one"

Simon in BusinessBlaze: "Second part because I like moneyy"

Well... Both statements are honest, I guess.

[cdybft]

A recent book on Mary Celeste:
“The topsails were up”.
That clue there, Solves it.
The other sails stowed but not the top sails because it was found several caskes were empty and some broken-they were not empty As the alcohol had evaporated. The fumes went up, Thea lightheaded and too lightheaded to risk going to remove the topsails. They got in the lifeboat with one line securing to wait out the evaporation but the line broke.
Bad luck. They could never catch up with the topsails still up.

[seanarthur]

Hello Simon and Team. Here is an idea: large artworks or large collections of art lost to history. Not sure if you can find enough to make a Side Project of this topic, but I have been fascinated by the stories of lost art. Big lost art in some cases. In current times we've lost the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. If you include collections and heritage sites, ISIL rampaged across their occupied territory in the Middle East destroying whole heritage sites and looting collections . Another fabled lost piece is a collection, the Amber Room, of 1716. It was stolen by Nazis in WWII and disappeared. Not a panel has been found. Is it somewhere in a vault? 6 tonnes of Amber plus gold leaf and mirrors...got to be somewhere, right? More curiously though is what happened to the last of Rembrandt's works. After his death he was still technically bankrupt and creditors were allowed to possess the contents of his art studio. There were dozens of unfinished paintings, many very large, and no one could make out what they were about. Descriptions make them sound like early attempts at abstract art! And none survive. Presumably the canvases were sold to other artists to be scraped off, cut apart and reused. But are there amateur and professional works from that era that have a ghostly image under them that are Rembrandt's last creative output? Or even on the back, which was the easy way to reuse a canvas, just take out the tacks and flip it around? And then there is the case of John Banvard, the American moving-panorama painter. His painting of the Mississippi river valley was 12 feet high and at least half a mile long. (Yes, 1/2 a MILE). He had a building put up just so he could make it. When he was done touring it all over the States, it was cut into much smaller pieces and sold, and not a single scrap exists today! That we know of. But what happened to the canvas pieces? Were some reused by artists? Is there a roll of canvas in someone's attic that's a chunk of this marvel? In square feet, "Mississippi" was 31, 680 which substantially eclipses Sacha Jafri's current (2020) "The Journey of Humanity" of 17, 000 sq ft or three basketball courts. Guinness book of records 'certifies' "Journey" as the world's largest painting but I protest. Largest extant painting perhaps. Another travesty is Plymouth Rock. Not artwork, but heritage. Most of it was chipped away by tourists and hucksters and now it's just a small boulder, a fraction of its original size! Not sure if there is other huge art lost to antiquity or stupidity... but you might be able to find more!

[sleepassist]

The manuscript has always made me chuckle. Awhile back I worked as an Instructor’s Aide in a special needs classroom. There was one student who would do these elaborate drawings and then write his own made up texts talking about his drawing.

I could see one maybe someone copying ones creations into a nice looking book as a gift.

[kinnexion]

2:50 had me cracking up for some reason. Dunno why. Love how Simon can be so composed and sophisticated one second and then the next he can shout and act really well. Love it

[badbiker]

I have done some calculations. I input the number of YouTube channels that Simon Whistler hosts, multiplied by the amount of time each video runs, added the number of hours each video takes to prepare, subtracted rehearsal time (because Simon obviously reads his copy cold on camera), and compared the results to the number of hours in a day and came to the conclusion that the only way Mr. Whistler can produce that much content is by using a Time Turner.

[christinaify]

In my imagination, the Colossus of Rhodes had to-scale, pendulous nads which helped sailors denote the direction of the wind. My imagination is fun.

[davidhendershot]

Suggested historical mysteries. I haven't yet seen the first one in this series, so there may be repeats:
1. Kaspar Hauser.
2. The third thing that Joan of Arc told the Dauphin.
3. Richard 3 and the Princes in the Tower.
4. Vienna Lance.
5. Who built Great Zimbabwe, and are the Lemba tribe who and what they say they are.
6. Lost army of Cambyses of Persia.
7. Disappearance of the Confederate treasury, or rather who stole it.
8. Count of St. Germain, who he really was and how he did it.
9. Whether Stalin was murdered by Beria.
10. Ark of the Covenant.

[rabbidrick]

Arrived so fast I had to help put out chairs for everyone.

[spacecadet]

The trouble with the story of the Mary Celeste is that 12 years after the incident a, then unknown, author by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story called "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" about finding an abandoned ship called the Marie Celeste. Most of the modern legend/mystery is actually from the short story and not from what actually happened.

[Beryllahawk]

Very intriguing!
I had a thought about the Manuscript -
If it was indeed written in the 1400s - paper was NOT cheap. Two hundred forty pages is rather a lot of paper. Perhaps not a lot compared to a copy of the Bible; but this was also highly unlikely to be some noble lady's journal, since such "blank books" generally did not exceed 100 pages, for the simple reason that they became a bit less easy to handle after that. I am thinking too that book binding of that time period, and the thickness of the paper used, made for a pretty heavy tome compared to a book of similar page count maufactured today.
At any rate, large or not, that's still an Expensive Thing To Use For Gibberish.
While it's possible that the book was used by someone of high breeding and low sanity - such persons did exist, after all - it seems to me that the family would rather have burned the resulting manuscript, not allowed it into any space where it might be publicly discussed. Mad noblemen (or noblewomen) were cared for by their families, yes, but not without quite a lot of shame and hushing-up involved. Embarrassing, don't you know, to acknowledge that Cousin Bert went off his head and had to be locked up in his own room. (Or whatever.)
BUT!! Something that seems more plausible: a nobleman (or woman) who was only a little bit of a crack-pot. Someone who could get away with being called "eccentric" rather than "mad." Someone who still had access to the sort of wealth and leisure that allows for writing out such a tome - by hand - on expensive materials. With colored ink, might I add, surely more expensive to procure than the usual black/brown ink made from oak galls. Perhaps the person was a hobbyist dabbling in the use of herbs as medicines, or perhaps they were an alchemist.
Alchemy in particular makes a lot of sense to me: it wasn't a hated notion, and while no one made fun of it the way we do in this century, it was most certainly a popular hobby among "eccentric" nobility, right? And many alchemists, hobbyists or not, seemed intent on keeping ANY discoveries they made quite to themselves. So they often wrote in riddles, in codes, in obscure languages or the like. And only an idiot would keep his cipher key right with the coded text: in fact, if the author were that sort of genius that seems like a madman to others of his own time...he might have kept the cipher inside his own skull.
Now of course I have absolutely no idea how one would go about finding evidence and ANY of this. But it just seems very logical to me, that this is some kind of journal.
I suppose it could still be a hoax, an object created specifically to confuse and infuriate the author's contemporaries. But if so - why preserve it? The folks who got pranked wouldn't want to keep it, certainly. But perhaps one of these days a bit more will be learned about the book and its origins, which would be neat :D

[seascape]

You have not mentioned what I consider one of the the biggest mysteries of the ancient world. What happened to the bodies of Anthony and Cleopatra? Did Octavian bury them together as Cleopatra requested? Or were they cremated in Roman fashion?
Or lost in the earthquakes of the Mediterranean Sea?
How great it would be to find their gravesite!