By April Holloway
Here we explore some of the remarkable underground discoveries that have occurred throughout the world.
Turkey
Derinkuyu in Cappadocia in Turkey is probably the largest underground city that has been discovered to date. It spans more than 8 levels going as deep as 80 meters with more than 600 entrances to the surface. Although the date the original city was built is unknown, the Turkish Department of Culture dates the city back to the 8th century BC. It was made by the Phrygians, ancient Indo-European people, who worshiped the “Great Mother”, Cybele, as the Greeks and Romans knew her. The Phrygians developed an advanced culture, famous for its music and the legend of King Midas, a Phrygian King, who turned everything he touched into gold.
Why the city was built is still unknown, but what is known is that it was used by the Christians escaping persecution from the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD. Cappadocia includes a huge number of underground tunnels and ‘cities’ and more and more are discovered every year.
Egypt
In Egypt, the Giza Plateau has an enormous underground system that is a combination of manmade caverns and tunnels as well as subterranean rivers and passages. Since 1978 the caverns have been mapped using ground penetrating radar with the explorations led by Dr Jim Hurtak who has supposedly entered massive chambers larger than our largest cathedrals. A few historians believe that the underground cave system in Giza, is the legendary ‘City of the Gods’, the massive underground city described by ancient writers Herodotus (5th century BC) and Strabo (1st Century AD). Herodotus wrote:
"There I saw twelve palaces regularly disposed, which had communication with each other, interspersed with terraces and arranged around twelve halls. It is hard to believe they are the work of man. The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends, there is a pyramid, two hundred and forty feet in height, with great carved figures of animals on it and an underground passage by which it can be entered. I was told very credibly that underground chambers and passages connected this pyramid with the pyramids at Memphis."
Furthermore, he spoke of the discovery of a multi-level megalithic metropolis under Giza that was 15,000 years old.
Many ancient writers supported Herodotus' record of underground passages connecting major pyramids and Lamblichus, a fourth-century Syrian representative of the Alexandrian School of mystical and philosophical studies, recorded information about an entranceway through the body of the Sphinx into the Great Pyramid:
"This entrance, obstructed in our day by sands and rubbish, may still be traced between the forelegs of the crouched colossus. It was formerly closed by a bronze gate whose secret spring could be operated only by the Magi. It was guarded by public respect, and a sort of religious fear maintained its inviolability better than armed protection would have done. In the belly of the Sphinx were cut out galleries leading to the subterranean part of the Great Pyramid. These galleries were so art-fully crisscrossed along their course to the Pyramid that, in setting forth into the passage without a guide throughout this network, one ceasingly and inevitably returned to the starting point."
Since the declassification of the ground penetrating radar, more and more underground systems have been discovered but not yet explored in various places around the world.
Wales
