⁠I Found the Lost Ararat Civilization at the Bottom of Lake Van | LCP #3

In 2017, underwater photographer Tahsin Ceylan was diving off the north shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey to film carbonate mounds when he came across stone walls on the lake floor. The press reported a 3,000 year old Urartian castle, and the story went quiet.Matthew LaCroix has spent three years working in the Van region with geologist Robert Schoch, archaeologist Hans Oreheim and Tahsin's dive team. In this episode he takes you down with him. On the lake floor is a circle of fitted stone with symbols carved into its first block. Behind it is a causeway, built in layers and taller than a man, that runs east into a part of the lake nobody has explored. The images of it have not been shown before.Matt's argument is that the Urartians did not build it. He goes around the lake site by site, through Toprakkale, Aznavurtepe, Ayanis, Çavuştepe and Kef, and shows the same thing at each one: precisely fitted andesite and basalt at the bottom, Urartian limestone and mud brick on top. At Ayanis the Urartian inscription steps around weathering pits that were already in the stone. At Çavuştepe seven giant T-shaped blocks were thrown off the hill. At Kef the old blocks were hauled downhill for a castle, and one of them has turned to glass.Then he turns to the lake itself. Lake Van has no outlet. Matt makes the case that eruptions of Mount Nemrut blocked the Murat River, that the lake rose over the old shoreline, and that the stone circle once sat on the best overlook of the older, smaller lake. He believes the causeway leads to a city under the eastern basin, and he shows where he thinks it is. Less than one percent of the lake has been explored. The dating is Matt's own reading of the geology and the drilling record, and he lays it out in full.The last part of the episode turns to the carved relief from Kef, which Matt reads as part of an ancient knowledge system, and to what he believes that system means for us now.MATTHEW LACROIXhttps://thestageoftime.comBOOKShttps://thestageoftime.com/booksTHE ANCIENT CODE DATABASEhttps://thestageoftime.com/acd-iTHE LOST CIVILIZATIONS PODCASThttps://thestageoftime.com/podcast