Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this little button below:
To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.
This is the twenty-second Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
As I tend to say quite a lot (I know), let me remind you that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
Today we’re going to be looking at a rather provocative paper that provoked a lot of discussion and was eventually retracted, about an issue that a lot of people love. In “Geo-archaeological prospecting of Gunung Padang buried prehistoric pyramid in West Java, Indonesia,” Danny Hilman Natawidjaja et al argued that they came across a pyramid which is not only the oldest in history, but older than any other candidate for almost 20,000 years.
Gunung Padang, a megalithic structure of an obviously religious nature, sits on top of an extinct volcano in West Java, Indonesia, and is still considered by (Muslim) locals to be a sacred site. After years of tomographic studies, the paper’s authors write that there is clear evidence showing that the Gunung Padang was made mostly by human hands. They also found evidence showing that the structure was built in stages, thousands of years apart.
How credible is this claim? Two years ago, I wrote about what I argued was the oldest pyramid in history, in “The First Pyramids of the Americas & the Indo-Europeans of the Steppes.” This is what I had to say:
In the north-central coast of Peru, where a drier weather led to the quick desertification of the coastal plain, the exploitation of some of the world's richest fishing grounds sustained a series of large settlements since about 4000 BC. Bandurria, which holds the first evidence of a ceremonial stone architecture in the Americas, was built with boulders and mortar.
By 3200 BC, Bandurria grew to become a city with a monumental center consisting of modest temples and perhaps storage silos. The settlement of Huaricanga, erected around 3500 BC, was another focal point of what has later being called the Norte Chico civilization, which emerged on the seasonal river valleys of the extremely dry plain, helped by the first irrigation works in the continent; these, in turn, were fed by the snowmelt of the Andean range, and perhaps helped by the first systematic use as fertilizer of guano, the rich, concentrated excrement of seabirds of bats that can be found in great amounts in parts of the Peruvian coast.
In Sechín, roughly in the same region, comparable settlements developed around 1,000 years later, including ceremonial centers. Caral, thirty-three kilometers to the north of Bandurria, was similar to that city, featuring a sunken circular plaza and stairways, as well as related structures constructed in a symmetrical pattern, that remained inhabited from well before 3000 BC until 1800 BC. At Caral's large central zone, we have the first evidence of an extremely popular, albeit intuitive, architectural form that would later be separately invented all over the world: the pyramid.
The city had between one and seven large, terraced platform mounds, at least some of them with steps, built by shoveling dirt in the rough shape of an artificial, square mountain. Like most similar monuments later built in Mesoamerica and those in Mesopotamia, but unlike those in Egypt, Caral pyramids were temples rather than funerary monuments.
It’s important to note that the builders of the Caral Pyramid appear to have done some work to turn their pile of dirt into the shape of a pyramid, including the addition of steps leading to the top, where sacrifices of some sort were conducted (in immediately pre-Hispanic times, these were often human sacrifices). However, the Indonesian paper reports not only that equivalent steps have been found in Gunung Padang, but also that step-like remains have been found on other prehistoric pyramid-like mounds in the region, that still require investigation.
An argument can definitely be made that, if Caral’s is a pyramid, Gunung Padang’s is a pyramid too. They’re both unlike the classic Egyptian pyramids in that those in Egypt were not mounds of dirt shoveled upwards, but carefully-designed constructions with internal chambers that were only built after Caral’s.
The first Egyptian pyramids date from the first half of the 4th millennium BC, while the first Mexican pyramid is comparatively really, really modern: it was only built in the mid-1st millennium, roughly in the era of Pythagoras, Confucius and Cyrus the Great. For those interested to know more about the subject, you can check here:
Also, a big shout out to my friend
, who found this excellent summary of objections to the consideration of Gunung Padang as a man-made pyramid, and published it here, and stayed on top of the issue, finally linking to this New York Times article about the retraction of the study by the journal that published it — despite the lead author’s objections.Please remember that all older posts and more, as you know, can be easily found here. Now, for the readers’ questions:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A History of Mankind to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.