Do you know what Nazca is? This is an ancient Indian civilization. It got its name from the river, in the valley of which one can still admire numerous cultural monuments. The heyday of this civilization was observed in the first millennium BC. Later, the name Nazca was worn by a small Indian village in the south of Peru, located behind the mountain ranges. In order to get to it from the capital of the state of Lima, it was necessary to drive many kilometers along a dusty dirt road located in a rocky and sandy wasteland.
Today, the capital of Peru and the city of Nazca are connected by a four-lane freeway. Moreover, that part of it, which passes through the bare hills and the desert, is paved with wild stones. A small and quiet village in the past, today it is a small but very neat town. It has its own museum and a small park, various shops and even two banks. There are hotels of various classes in the town that accept tourists who have gone to this area in order to get acquainted with the world-famous "Pampa de Nasca".
Geography
What attracts tourists fromaround the world a small town in southern Peru? Travelers come here to look at the amazing and mysterious Nazca plateau. This is a plain, located on a certain hill. For her, as for all plateaus, a flat, and sometimes wavy relief is characteristic. It is slightly dissected in places. Distinct ledges separate the plateau from other plains.
Where is Nazca? This plateau is located in the south of Peru. It is separated from the capital of the country, Lima, by 450 km, which must be overcome in a southeasterly direction. The Nazca Desert on the map is located almost in the coastal zone of the Pacific Ocean. From the plateau to its endless waters - no more than eighty kilometers.
The Nazca coordinates will help you find this area on the map faster. They are 14° 41' 18" South and 75° 7' 22" West.
The Nazca plateau has an elongated shape from north to south. Its length is 50 km. But the width of the area from the western to the eastern borders ranges from five to seven kilometers.
Natural conditions
The Nazca coordinates are such that the area is located in a dry climate zone. As a result, it is sparsely populated. Winter here lasts from June to September. This is surprising to us, but the change of seasons in the Southern Hemisphere does not coincide with that which is typical for the zone located north of the equator.
As for the air temperature, it is practically stable in this area. In the winter months, its value does not fall below sixteen degrees. In the summer, the thermometer stays almost constantat +25.
The Nazca Plateau, as mentioned above, is located in close proximity to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. However, despite this, rains are very rare here. There are no winds on the plateau either, since it is protected from air masses by mountain ranges. There are no rivers and streams in this desert either. You can only see their dry beds here.
Nazca Lines
However, it is not its location that attracts many tourists to this region. The Nazca plateau beckons with mysterious drawings and lines located right on the earth's surface. Scientists call them geoglyphs. This concept means a geometric figure made in the ground, the length of which is at least four meters.
The Nazca geoglyphs are grooves made from a mixture of sand and pebbles dug into the soil. They are not deep (15-30 cm), but long (up to 10 km), having different widths (from 150 to 200 m). Geoglyphs, or, as they are also called, the Nazca lines, are made in a very bizarre form. Here you can see the outlines of birds, spiders and animals, as well as geometric shapes. There are about 13 thousand such lines on the plateau.
What is this? Secrets of history? Mysteries of the past? There is no single answer to these questions. Some scientists believe that the Nazca drawings are applied to the earth's surface by skillful human hands. However, it is still impossible to confirm this assumption. There is another, rather stable opinion, according to which the stripes and lines were applied not by people, but by representatives of an alienmind. This is the greatest secret of the Nazca desert, over which dozens of scientists are struggling. However, despite this, the mystery of the Peruvian plateau remains unsolved for the modern world.
Discovery history
The Nazca Desert (Peru) is known for its huge paintings located on the plateau. These drawings, created by unknown creators, belong to the greatest achievements of world culture and are an undoubted monument of art throughout our planet.
For the first time, pilots noticed giant ground paintings in 1927. But the geoglyphs of Nazca became known to the scientific community only twenty years later. It was then that the American historian Paul Kosok published a whole series of photographs of amazing and mysterious drawings that were made from the air.
Creation technology
The Nazca drawings were created by removing debris, brown stones and volcanic pebbles, covered with a thin coating of black, from a light subsoil, consisting of a mixture of calcite, clay and sand. That is why the contours of giant figures are clearly visible from a helicopter or plane.
From the air, all the lines against the background of the soil look lighter, although from the ground or from low mountains, such patterns merge with the ground and cannot be distinguished.
Lines and geometric shapes
All images that can be observed in the Nazca desert have a different shape. Some of them are stripes or lines, the width of which is in the range from fifteen centimeters to ten or more meters. Such depressionssoils are quite long. They can stretch from one to three or even more kilometers. The strips can also smoothly expand along their length.
Some Nazca lines are elongated or truncated triangles. This is the most common type of geometric figures on the plateau. Moreover, their sizes are very diverse and range from one to three kilometers. Such triangles are often called trapezoids. Some Nazca drawings are large squares that have a rectangular or irregular shape.
You can also see on the plateau such quadrangles, familiar to us from geometry, as trapezoids (with two parallel sides). There are about seven hundred such creations with clear forms in the desert.
Many lines and platforms have some deepening of the arcuate profile up to thirty or more centimeters. Moreover, all these grooves have clear boundaries, resembling a border.
Feature of the Nazca lines
Geoglyphs of the Peruvian desert are widely known because of their straightness. The imagination of travelers is literally amazed by the lines stretching for many kilometers along the plateau, easily overcoming all the features of the relief. In addition, the Nazca figures have peculiar centers, located, as a rule, on hills. At these points, different types of lines converge and diverge. Often, recesses in the ground are connected to each other, while combining in various combinations. It happens that shapes and lines overlap each other.
The location of the trapezoids is also interesting. Their bases are usuallyturned towards the river valleys and located below the narrow part.
It is also surprising that:
- the edges of all lines have the highest accuracy, the spread of which is within only five centimeters over a length of several kilometers;
- contours remain visible even when shapes overlap;
- there is a strict limitation of figures in width with significant lengths of stripes;
- streaks remain visible even with changes in ground characteristics;
- there is a similarity of the configuration and arrangement of ray-shaped figures with optical schemes;
- the geometry of the figures is preserved even with complex terrain;
- there are lines that are astronomical in nature, indicating the cardinal points or the days of the equinoxes.
Various designs
Zigzags and whip-shaped figures are a kind of decoration of large-scale areas of the Nazca plateau. Among 13,000 lines, 800 platforms and hundreds of different spirals in the amazing and mysterious Peruvian desert, you can see semantic drawings. These are three dozen figures of animals and birds, including:
- a 200-meter long lizard crossed by a ribbon of an American highway whose builders did not notice the pattern;
- a bird with a snake neck stretching 300 m;
- hundred-meter condor;
- 80-meter spider.
In addition to these images, you can see fish and birds, a monkey and a flower, something similar to a tree, as well as a thirty-meter figure of a man, made not at all on a plateau, but as if carved on one of the steepslopes of the mountain.
From the ground, all these drawings are nothing but separate strokes and stripes. You can admire the giant images only by rising into the air. These greatest mysteries of history, the riddles of the past, have not yet been clarified by scientists. How did an ancient civilization without aircraft manage to create such complex drawings, and what is their purpose?
Features of Nazca drawings
Contour images of birds and animals have different sizes, ranging from 45 to 300 m. The width of the contour line of the drawings is from 15 cm to 3 m. All semantic images that can be seen on the Nazca plateau are concentrated along its edge located above the valley of the river Ingenio.
Among the features of these drawings are:
- execution of one continuous, nowhere intersecting and non-closing line;
- beginning and end of excavation are located on the site;
- "output" and "input" of the circuits are two parallel lines;
- there is a perfect pairing of curved drawings and straight lines, which, as established by scientists, are made according to the strict laws of mathematics, which explains their harmony and beauty;
- mechanical execution (except for the image of a monkey), which deprives the figures of animals of any emotional coloring;
- the presence of asymmetry, which is explained by the imperfection of the work to increase the sketches;
- the presence of secant lines parallel to one of the contour segments, which is explained bycomplex execution of the internal space of the figure.
Assumptions and versions
Who is the author of the amazing creations in the Nazca desert? So far, scientists can only build their own versions and put forward various hypotheses. So, there are many supporters of the assumption of the extraterrestrial origin of geoglyphs. They suggest that the wide lines served as runways for extraterrestrial civilization. However, such a hypothesis has many opponents who put forward their very weighty argument - the nature of the drawings. Yes, they are impressive and far from terrestrial in size, but their plot suggests that they were made by people, and not aliens at all.
However, in this case, there are many unresolved mysteries. How did unknown artists manage to create such gigantic images that are visible only from the air? Why did they do it? What techniques were used to keep the proportions of giant models?
The hypotheses about the origin of the drawings on the Nazca plateau are varied, and some of them are simply fantastic. However, among the existing versions, there are those that deserve special attention.
So, according to some scientists, the entire system of Nazca lines is a huge calendar. One of the first to put forward this assumption was Paul Kosok. This American scientist was the first to discover the mysterious conglomeration of various shapes and lines. His whole life after that was devoted to unraveling the mystery of the Peruvian desert. Once Kosok noticed that the settingthe sun set directly at the intersection of the horizon with one of the straight lines. He also discovered a band indicating a winter opposition. There is also Kosok's assumption that certain drawings correspond to certain cosmic bodies. This hypothesis has existed for a long time. Moreover, it was supported by many famous scientists from all over the world. However, later it was proved that the percentage of coincidence of Nazca drawings with certain planets is extremely small in order to consider this system a calendar.
There is another very plausible version. According to her, the Nazca lines indicate the location of an extensive system of underground water channels. This hypothesis can be confirmed by the fact that the location of ancient wells coincides with the strips dug in the ground. But it is possible that this is just a mere coincidence.
Maybe the purpose of the Nazca lines is a cult? Excavations of archaeologists have found ancient human burials and altars in places where drawings were made. However, all ritual objects have always been built in such a way that they can evoke certain emotions and influence a person. The drawings, viewed only from a height, do not evoke any feelings in those who are on the ground.
Be that as it may, the one who created these amazing figures had the ability to somehow move through the air and was remarkably oriented in space. Maybe ancient people knew how to buildballoons and flew them?
All existing hypotheses have not yet brought humanity closer to unraveling the mystery of the Nazca desert. Maybe soon scientists will answer the question about the origin of amazing lines? Or maybe this mystery will remain unsolved…
