So there you have it, a collection of mysteriously amazing monuments dotted around the world that are as confusing as they are famous. We think we ‘know’ global icons such as the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Easter Island giants, but do we really? We certainly know of them, but do we understand them? No way. Somewhere in the back of our minds, amid all the awe and amazement, is a deep-seated sense of unease, something we can’t quite figure out, can’t reconcile. The fact is there’s something about these relics from a far and distant past that we just can’t fathom.

When Did Humans Become Civilised?

We understand that history goes through cycles of growth and decline, with empires evolving out of the dust only to gradually decline and eventually perish, succeeded by new civilisations that rise up out of the ashes of their predecessors. The earliest human civilisation known to us is Sumeria, which grew out of the villages and towns of Sumer in what is now southern Iraq. Back then that region was much greener, its fertile land washed by the nutrients of seasonally flooding rivers, as was the case later in Egypt.

The oldest known town in the world is at Tell el-’Oueili, at the cradle of civilised life that sprung forth in Sumer and later expanded throughout Elam, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Egypt and the entire Fertile Crescent, also to the Indus Valley and the banks of the Yellow River in modern-day China. It is said to have first been settled some 6,500 years before the current era, which is to say 8,500 years ago. Though Tell el-’Oueili was probably not much more than a village by modern standards it is telling, as this is the furthest back we have delved into our origins as a civilised species.

Add another thousand years and a picture begins to form, with larger towns being drawn into a constellation of settlements that formed the basis of Sumeria, the first real state. Sargon of Akkad, from a little further upstream along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, has gone down in history as the first empire-builder, in reality the first of many such megalomaniacs whose insatiable ego-tripping have soured mankind’s existence on this planet ever since. That was approximately 4,400 years ago, by which time early forms of writing had evolved, along with trade routes, kings, temples, war (inevitably) and ziggurats, fascinating structures that kickstarted the strange human tendency to want to build huge edifices that reached up into the sky. The Tower of Babel was described as being a Ziggurat, and it was of course followed by the pyramids of Egypt, the Aztecs, and later all manner of palaces, temples, churches, mosques, and more recently skyscrapers – the almighty temples of corporate power.

Civilisation Appears… And Disappears

Those early empires that had evolved so mysteriously reached dizzying heights of technology and sophistication in mathematics, geometry, medicine, engineering, and construction techniques only to disappear. Of course, it wasn’t overnight but took decades or even centuries to unfold, yet from this distance there are so many pieces of the puzzle missing that it seems like they simply came and went. But it isn’t the fact that empires ebbed and flowed that has us baffled about phenomena such as the Egyptian pyramids, nor even that technology and civilisation were sometimes lost for long centuries, as in the case of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. What is hard to figure out, and continues to dumbfound historians to this day, is just how advanced some of them were.

In other words, if we still can’t really figure out how it was possible to transport massive stones and blocks of marble across hundreds of kilometres to then erect structures such as Stonehenge and would really struggle to replicate the feat even today, with our ‘advanced’ technology, then how did people achieve such feats several thousands of years ago? And this is where it gets interesting, as a growing number of people have begun to speculate that early human civilisations are very unlikely to have been capable of such high points as the construction of the pyramids of Giza or the monoliths of Stonehenge. They have a point, since how could the early Polynesian settlers of Easter Island have erected hundreds of moai (huge stone statues) and distributed them across the island with the tools available to them?

Or Did They?

We know that there were early empires that reached dizzy heights before war and destruction, or simply decay, plunged them into the darkness of backwardness again, but a lot remains unexplained. Even today, when we have laser cutting technology, it would be virtually impossible to build something as perfect as the Egyptian pyramids, and then there’s the geometrical alignment of everything from said pyramids to those of the ancient civilisations of Central and South America, as well as Stonehenge. We still don’t understand their meaning clearly, yet it all begins to make sense when you interpret them as earthbound beacons providing precise coordinates for anything that would come from up above, from space.

I laughed too, but archaeologists have found hieroglyphic depictions not only of kings, servants, and battles on the walls of temples, tombs and palaces in Egypt and across other parts of the world, but also illustrations of strange flying craft manned by people wearing what looks a lot like a modern motorbike helmet. The same argument is made for a perplexing phenomenon known as the Nazca Lines, hundreds of huge drawings and geometric patterns carved into the Peruvian desert. Many are so big that the very people who are meant to have made them wouldn’t have been able to see what they created even from the highest mountain peaks – they are essentially visible only from the air!

Modern technology is unearthing more and more pyramids and related phenomena and finding that they have the same focus on geometric stargazing – they only really make sense as a beacon to craft coming in from way up high, like space. It is this, together with the sheer sophistication of the structures and their mathematical precision, that has caused a growing number of people to conclude that mere earthlings such as us could not have created the famous icons that have so far been credited to our ancestors’ civilisations.

An extraterrestrial connection would also explain their purpose, and from this point on the theories fly in all directions, ranging from plausible to truly outlandish, yet some remain compelling enough to make even the greatest sceptics have some doubt that once, long ago, alien beings might have given us a hand to create what we would still struggle to replicate now, thousands of years later. And if this should be so, then questions such as ‘why?’ and ‘are they still here?’ are inevitably next on our agenda.