"Cyclopean" architecture. Was it meant to defend against the Cyclopes?

This is revision 2.0 of a hypothesis for why megalithic structures were built.

Ancient Greeks referred to what we call Megalithic construction as "Cyclopean" construction.

It is believed that they were mistaking the skulls of mammoths for being the heads of some kind of giant humanoid with one eye in the middle of their head (where the trunk socket is, but it looks kind of like an eye socket).


I'm thinking that maybe these walls may actually have been built to keep the "cyclopes" out. (Or rather to protect against mammoth incursions.)


Most of the forests of the world formed during the "Boreal" period, which came soon after the end of the last ice age. Prior to that, it seems that most of the world's terrain was dominated by fast growth plants, like tall grasses and such.

Mammoths have to eat between 300 and 500 pounds of food per day (depending on how big they are.)

Probably the herds just walked around stripping the land completely bare. They would end up carrying seeds with them from one place to the next, and when they came back in a few months, it would all have grown back again. Usually, anyway.

However, the humans were known to hunt them. (Mammoths are a lot smarter than other megafauna such as bison, so they probably were not unaware of this.) So mammoths probably tended to avoid human occupied areas. But....... this meant the vegetation around those human lands was going uneaten. It would just get more and more green, and tempting.

Most Megafauna are known to be territorial. Those horns/tusks/whatever are not just to defend against predators. Males will sometimes square off and have tusk battles.

Probably whenever two herds entered the same area, a tusk off would decide who had to leave and who got to stay.

The loser of enough tusk offs, might get desperate enough to venture into human lands for food. Also any mammoth who loses their herd might. And so humans didn't have to go looking for prey. It frequently enough would come to them.


But there is one problem: sometimes TOO MANY came at once.

During hard enough times, a big army of mammoths might form, and decide to go eat the vegetation around the humans together. If they came in a group, the humans would not have any chance of winning.

Human hunting methods usually focused on inflicting a wound that might kill the mammoth in a few days, but wasn't even hardly going to slow the mammoth down in the next few minutes. They would, for example, make long flint spear tips designed to break off and stay stuck in the creature's skin. By tracking the herd for a day or two, they'd probably catch up and find a carcass waiting.

But a mammoth's vital organs, like its heart, are at least a foot inside the skin. Good luck piercing that deep!



So how do the humans avoid getting driven off of their land every couple of years?


Build a high platform. About 15 or 20 feet would easily be high enough to perfectly protect against a mammoth. Mammoths can't climb.

However, a mammoth can weigh anywhere from 5 to 12 tons.

They're big enough animals to be able to destroy a normal brick wall.

If you want your platform to be a genuine fortification, it needs to be made out of big blocks, minimum 5 tons or so, and then you would want to interlock them so the mammoth can't push them loose one at a time. (Remember: elephants are pretty smart, as large mammals go.)


So when a mammoth incursion comes, the humans and their families gather on top of the platform with some grain or something to eat for a few days. The men bring spears up with them, so they can pelt the mammoths with them (knowing it probably won't kill any of them right away - perhaps make them angry.)

The mammoths eat and eat until all the vegetation is gone, and then leave. Leaving a few corpses behind, which the humans can now eat.




But my point is: I don't think these were vanity projects. Or monuments.

I think they were really meant to something practical.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous
How did these primitive people cut and haul stones for miles and then fit them together with such precision that a piece of paper will not fit between the joints?

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Funny, I was planning on making a thread about the Cyclopes and Cyclopean walls and architecture.

The mammoth theory is only based off one island where a small variation of mammoth skulls were found in caves. The myth of the Cyclopes actually has two versions of the giants. One, they are basically lone wolves, extremely selfish creatures, and answer to no one, not even the gods. And they too reside in giant caves, where they usually tend to their flock of sheep. The other are extremely skilled and highly revered, and rare almost demi-god like beings, that crafted Zeus' weapons, lightning bolts.

So you can see there is quite the contrast between the two myths. But one is more popular over the other because of the Odysseus and his Odyssey.

The whole myth of the cave dwelling giants also includes the whole giant walled structures. But the ones that are still intact, are actually rather small, for example the Lions gate the smaller interlocked stones are dwarfed by the later added giant slabs.

The thing is, all Cyclopean structures were built during the Bronze age, long, long, long after that species of mammoth went extinct. The only reason why they thought the Cyclopse built those structures, was because Greece went through a long drawn out dark age, and they simply just forgot and lost all knowledge how to build and stack such large stones.

A good thing to look into, is the evolution of doric columns, from when they were just roughly shaped stones stacked upon each other, to the masterpieces uptop on the acropolis.
I am going to strongly disagree here, and come to a conclusion that those structures weren't meant to keep out giants or mammoth, they were to keep out invaders, people.
Also, the mammoth in question were rather small, and more in kind to modern elephants.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Could it be so simple that stone is simply the best natural material to build with...no processing nor manufacturing...just cutting trimming and placing.

When we travel to other Planets this will also be our choice.

S+F

I love Ante Diluvian material as I am convinced an advanced culture thrived during those times, techologically advanced? Not in our "technological sense", rather, advance with the materials available and made efficient use of them, a large and stable enough culture to expand globally, spreading "divine" knowledge, which could be anything from understanding the seasons to water purification methods.

Thanks again, I look forward to more.

Maybe those stone walls were meant to keep out cyclists...

a reply to: Arnie123

You mean the bronze age? When the Mycenaean and Minoan cultures built those things in what is known in today's world as modern Greece.

a reply to: strongfp

I don’t see why both those myths couldn’t be true if one wanted to run down that path.

Farmers and engineers.

a reply to: TheAlleghenyGentleman

Possibly. I am going to guess you are pointing out that it was farmers or laborers and engineers or skilled trades people who built the structures and they are just depicted as giants?

a reply to: strongfp

No. I was going far out and just having fun with it. Simply pointing out that whatever the giants were having skilled labor and farmers seems like a good plan. We have so much lost history it’s possible there was a race of skilled labor/agriculture giants that evolved differently from us that died out and we passed story of them down through the generations. A ghost species. One that was isolated and was recorded sparingly.

Or of course ALIENS!!!

a reply to: TheAlleghenyGentleman

And it's not at all suspicious that most of those tales were thought up shortly after the bronze age collapse when people were plunged into a dark age?

How come there's no tales of giants in Egyptian mythology? The only area of the known world at the time that didn't fall into darkness?

originally posted by: strongfp
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Funny, I was planning on making a thread about the Cyclopes and Cyclopean walls and architecture.

The mammoth theory is only based off one island where a small variation of mammoth skulls were found in caves. The myth of the Cyclopes actually has two versions of the giants. One, they are basically lone wolves, extremely selfish creatures, and answer to no one, not even the gods. And they too reside in giant caves, where they usually tend to their flock of sheep. The other are extremely skilled and highly revered, and rare almost demi-god like beings, that crafted Zeus' weapons, lightning bolts.

So you can see there is quite the contrast between the two myths. But one is more popular over the other because of the Odysseus and his Odyssey.

The whole myth of the cave dwelling giants also includes the whole giant walled structures. But the ones that are still intact, are actually rather small, for example the Lions gate the smaller interlocked stones are dwarfed by the later added giant slabs.

Lion's gate is an interesting monument. The stones are certainly big enough to count as "megalithic".

en.wikipedia.org...

A good example of the polygonal construction is : Sacsaywaman, Peru

ashtronort.wordpress.com...


What you'll notice when you look at the pics on the site is that the wall is only about twice the height of a person.

Human invaders would have little trouble making ladders tall enough to reach that. And the height advantage for projectile weapons would only favor the defenders by a fair margin.

The wall would be hard to tear down, but not too hard to bypass.

Unless the attacker is a mammoth, in which case a wall that tall is totally impenetrable.




As far as finding mammoth skulls in caves, a cave would also be an impenetrable barrier to a mammoth.

The thing is, all Cyclopean structures were built during the Bronze age, long, long, long after that species of mammoth went extinct. The only reason why they thought the Cyclopse built those structures, was because Greece went through a long drawn out dark age, and they simply just forgot and lost all knowledge how to build and stack such large stones.

That is not unlikely. The Bronze age prior to the bronze age collapse is an immensely interesting time, because so little got written about it. But the archaeological digs of the cities they left behind demonstrate they were glorious empires.

I'm not going to say they couldn't have made the megaliths. But they also might have been making a second group of megaliths, just to show they were as great as the people who had built the earlier ones.

An imitation by way of competition.


I think rulers who came later, after cultures that had made megalithic structures, did everything they could to bury, and or obscure, or malign the builders, so their people wouldn't be asking them why they couldn't seem to build cool stuff like that also.

The last thing you want when you're a ruler, is for somebody else to show you up, who isn't even around anymore. You can't go invade them. Can't even send emissaries to befriend them. Just have to sit there and be humiliated by your own inability to replicate their accomplishments.

originally posted by: one4all
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Could it be so simple that stone is simply the best natural material to build with...no processing nor manufacturing...just cutting trimming and placing.

When we travel to other Planets this will also be our choice.

It could that simple indeed.

But lingering question is: why build on such a large scale?

I'm thinking the reason for making them so big was because the thing they were trying to defend against was also very big.

Smaller stones just wouldn't do the job.

a reply to: strongfp

I have never deep dived Egyptian giants but doing a quick google I find a lot of entries for that query.

Im going to look deeper tonight and tomorrow morning and see if any of it actually holds salt.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

All these other worldly structures across the globe that mainstream academia
convinced people for years were the workings of people who didn't even have
a wheel? And the whole time anyone with half a brain can open the Bible and
read the absolute truth and explain them in perfect sense.

People will do any thing to reject the truth.