The Babylonians left behind a map showing eight mysterious regions beyond the known world.
Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian scribes produced something remarkable. A clay tablet showing the known world, surrounded by a vast body of water, with eight additional regions lying beyond it.
The artifact is real. It is known as the Babylonian Map of the World, catalogued as BM 92687, and is currently held by the British Museum.
At its center are recognizable places, including Babylon, Assyria, and the Euphrates River.
Surrounding them is an enormous circular body of water called the Bitter River.
But what interests me is what they placed on the other side.Beyond this boundary are eight mysterious regions called nagû. They are represented by triangular formations, with inscriptions indicating distances between them.
One region carries an extraordinary description: "Where Shamash is not seen." Shamash was the Mesopotamian sun god. In other words, the Babylonians described a place beyond their world where the sun could not be seen.
The cuneiform text gets weirder.
It mentions a great serpent, a dragon, the Anzû creature, and a scorpion man. There are references to ruined cities, divine beings associated with the sea, and Utnapishtim, the legendary survivor of the Great Flood.
Not all of these descriptions can be assigned to particular regions because significant portions of the tablet are damaged.
The reverse of the tablet describes journeys toward these outer regions. The distances are recorded, yet the inscription says that their interiors are unknown.
The Babylonians created a map containing recognizable geographical locations, surrounded them with an enormous sea, and then deliberately included eight additional territories beyond that boundary.
They recorded distances between them.
Historians generally interpret this as a cosmological map rather than evidence of forgotten continents. That is a reasonable interpretation.
Were these regions simply products of religious imagination, or were the Babylonians preserving descriptions inherited from a much older tradition whose original meaning had already been lost?
We know the Mesopotamians preserved stories of a civilization destroyed by a great flood. We also know their traditions describe extraordinary beings, ancient teachers, and knowledge passed down from an earlier age.
Now we have a physical map placing mysterious territories beyond the boundaries of their familiar world.
What exactly did the Babylonians believe existed beyond the Bitter River?
Was there something in their inherited knowledge that they could describe, but no longer explain?
The reddish "outer layer" of this block in Peru is breaking away, revealing what appears to be a different type of stone beneath it.
On the adjacent rock (left) the reddish layer is thinning near the top, as if it had been plastered on, but this is stone... not plaster.
If you're looking for something to watch this Sunday I just released my latest feature-length documentary taking you through some of the most mysterious ancient sites in Peru.
The highest quality footage you will find online for these
incredible places.
Link in the comments!
Ice core data from Greenland reveals something that challenges everything we think we know about climate stability. The evidence shows that during the last ice age, temperatures shifted from full glacial to interglacial conditions not once, but twice, and each transition happened in just three to five years. Not centuries. Not decades. Three to five years. The measurements come from annual ice layer thickness spanning fifteen thousand years, and the pattern is unmistakable. What caused these rapid shifts remains unknown. The mechanisms driving such extreme transitions are still not understood. But the implications are staggering. If a shift like that happened today, moving from our current interglacial state into glacial conditions over the span of five years, modern civilization would not survive it. The infrastructure, agriculture, and systems we depend on are built for climate stability. A return to ice age conditions in half a decade would collapse all of it. That is not speculation. That is what the data tells us is possible.
The fossil record tells a story of catastrophic discontinuity, not gradual change. Mass extinction events have wiped out half to ninety percent of all species multiple times in Earth's history, reshaping life on a planetary scale. That pattern, once dismissed as heresy against uniformitarianism, is now scientific consensus. The question he's raising is whether human civilization follows the same rule. Cultures rise, flourish, and then collapse abruptly, often with no clear internal cause. The archaeological record shows civilizations that simply vanish or contract violently within a generation or two. If natural systems are governed by catastrophic resets, why would human systems be exempt? Climate shifts, cosmic events, geological upheavals: these forces don't negotiate. Societies that couldn't adapt, that lacked resilience or foreknowledge, were erased. The pattern repeats. Understanding that isn't fatalism. It's pattern recognition.
An old Jewish legend says that when God decided to destroy the earth with a great flood, he pulled one of the stars out of the Pleiades and threw it at the earth. That's not metaphor for metaphor's sake. That's encoding. The Pleiades show up again and again in flood traditions across cultures, not as decoration but as a celestial marker, a timestamp in the sky. What were they tracking? What did they see?
Carlson points out that these stories imply our ancestors had a far more sophisticated understanding of cosmological phenomena than they've been given credit for. They weren't primitive. They were observers. They were recording events in the language available to them, and that language was myth. The question isn't whether the flood happened. The question is what they were watching in the sky when it did.
Humans in SAUDI ARABIA 115,000 years ago?
Isn't that like 50,000 years before they were supposed to be there?
And yes, they're Homo sapiens.
Is Out of Africa really wrong?
The out-of-Africa date keeps moving backward in time, closer to the (also relatively newly discovered) 300,000 year date for modern homo-sapiens
I cannot make sense of it, but it sure is fishy
🚨BREAKING🚨: The UFO cover-up is controlled by a secret society, founded in 1945 by the American and British spymasters who ran Allied intelligence in WWII, funded by dynastic banking money and built on the Nazi technology they smuggled out of a collapsing Europe.
The organization is the World Commerce Corporation, registered in Panama to bury its origins, its board reading like a spymasters' reunion: Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles and Britain's William Stephenson. It was born from a secret 1944 meeting in Paris where the Nazis, seeing the war was lost, planned to smuggle their scientists, technology and gold out of Europe. Researcher Jason Samosa (@jason_samosa ) argues it's the real-world model for the “Maynard Consortium” in Tom DeLonge's Sekret Machines, the novels inspired by conversations he had with General William McCasland. McCasland (who ran the Air Force lab where the Roswell wreckage was supposedly taken) vanished from his New Mexico home earlier this year, days after Trump announced a wave of UFO disclosure. Ben Rich, who built America's most secret aircraft at Lockheed, admitted near the end of his life that the UFO issue was governed by an international board sitting above even him.
The conversation also runs through the 1952 CIA program that quietly studied whether UFOs weren't aliens but demons. The devout Catholics threaded all the way up the CIA, enough that the Vatican may have a hand in controlling the UFO secret itself. Many coming out of this original CIA research group embedded themselves as bulwarks against further UFO research because they thought it was demonic. This loose network became known as the Collins Elite. It all circles back to Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception: UFOs, while literal objects, are incomprehensible as nuts-and-bolts spaceships, and the phenomenon's real product may be belief itself, an apocalyptic mythology built to keep a whole planet docile.
This was one of the most cerebral episodes we've filmed. Live now.
Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members.
Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.”
Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.”
Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.”
Employee: “Please leave.”
American taxpayer dollars at work.
🚨WHAT ON EARTH??!!!!
The National Guard has just SUSPENDED all 8 pilots of the Apache helicopters that flew on the "Salute to the Shore" flyover across the South Carolina coast.
No reason has been given for their suspension.
A source says as soon as the pilots landed, they got a message saying they were suspended pending an investigation.
Neither the spirit of this Declaration nor due respect for the red lines contained therein resides in our nation’s capital.
On this 250th anniversary of our Founders’ bold assertion of these principles, let’s honor them by keeping this flame burning within us.