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  Quick Facts: Location: Shiyan Beicun village, Longyou County, Zhejiang Province, China | Date/Year: Carved over 2,000 years ago; rediscovered 1992 | Status: Unsolved | Scale: 24 chambers catalogued at first, over 30,000 square metres in total In 1992, a handful of villagers in eastern China ran a water pump for 17 days to empty a pond that local legend said had no bottom. When the water finally dropped, they found a stone doorway under the surface. Behind it was a hall with a ceiling as high as a cathedral's, and not one written record explained who had cut it. The Pond Nobody Trusted Shiyan Beicun sits near Fenghuang Hill, in the countryside of Quzhou. The village had a cluster of ponds, and the old stories said they were bottomless. People accepted that the way you accept most things you grew up hearing. One villager didn't. English-language accounts usually give his name as Wu Anai, though sources disagree on the details. Some say four farmers did the pumping, others ...

  Quick Facts:  Location: Temple of Hathor, Dendera, Egypt | Date/Year: Carved c. 54 BCE-1st century CE; debated since 1968 | Status: Ongoing | Also: The temple stands about 60 km north of Luxor, on the Nile's west bank Squeeze down into the crypts beneath the Temple of Hathor and you'll find passages so tight you have to turn your shoulders to move through them. On one wall, a figure kneels beside a huge, bulb-shaped object, and inside it a snake ripples from end to end. A thick cord runs from the bulb to a small box. To a lot of modern visitors, it looks like a light bulb carved into stone two thousand years ago. The Temple Behind the Bulb Part of the Dendera temple complex, Egypt. Photo: Steve F-E-Cameron, CC BY-SA 4.0, via World History Encyclopedia. Dendera isn't a lost site. The temple complex sits just outside the modern city of Qena, and Egyptians were worshipping Hathor, goddess of love, music, and the sky, in the area long before the current building went up. T...

  Quick Facts :  Location: Eastern Desert, Egypt (now in Turin, Italy) | Date/Year : c. 1150 BCE | Status :  Partly solved | Age :  roughly 3,150 years, making it the oldest known map to show geology When Jean-François Champollion reached Turin in 1824, he opened crates of Egyptian papyri that had been jostled across the Mediterranean and found more fragments than scrolls. Somewhere in that pile of curled, flaking pieces was a hand-colored sketch of a desert valley, drawn by a man who had probably walked it himself. A Scroll in Pieces The papyri came from the collection of Bernardino Drovetti, a French consul in Egypt who spent years buying antiquities from local diggers. The Kingdom of Sardinia bought his collection in 1824, and it became the core of Turin's Egyptian Museum. Drovetti never wrote down where each papyrus came from, so we're left with educated guesses. The strongest one points to Deir el-Medina, the village on the west bank of Thebes where the artis...

  Quick Facts: Location:  Sagadahoc, mouth of the Kennebec River, Phippsburg, Maine | Date/Year:  August 1607 to autumn 1608 | Status: Partly solved, excavations ongoing | Also: Its settlers built a 30-ton ship, the Virginia , among the first English-built vessels in North America In February 1608, George Popham, the president of a brand-new English colony on the Maine coast, died in the cold. His men buried him somewhere near their fort. More than 400 years later, no one has confirmed where. The Colony That Beat the Pilgrims by 13 Years Most Americans can recite the Jamestown date: May 1607. Far fewer know that three months later, 120 Englishmen were digging in at the edge of what's now Maine, under the same royal charter system. King James I had split Virginia in 1606. The London Company got the south. The Plymouth Company, backed by merchants in Devon and Bristol, got the north. Its biggest champion was Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, a man who'...

  Quick Facts : Location: Stockholm, Sweden (made in Podlažice, Bohemia) | Date/Year: Early 13th century | Status: Unsolved | Weight: 75 kg (165 lb) The Codex Gigas: The Devil's Bible and the Monk Who Wrote It Turn to folio 290 of the world's largest medieval manuscript and something turns to look back at you. A crouching figure fills the whole page. It's horned and clawed, with a red tongue and an ermine loincloth, and its arms are raised as if mid-pounce. Whoever painted it wanted you to feel watched. A Book Too Heavy to Carry Alone The Codex Gigas, "Giant Book" in Latin, measures roughly 92 centimeters tall, 50 wide and 22 thick. It weighs about 75 kilograms, and it takes at least two people to lift safely. Tradition says its 310 leaves (620 pages) came from 160 animal skins, usually described as donkey hides, though how exactly the parchment was sourced is still debated. It was made in the early 1200s at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in what...

  Five Latin words, 25 letters, readable in four directions. Quick Facts: Location: Pompeii, Dura-Europos (Syria), Cirencester (England), plus dozens of other sites | Date/Year: Before AD 79 (earliest known example) | Status: Unsolved | Grid: 25 letters that read the same in four directions In 1925, excavators working in Pompeii's Large Palaestra found five Latin words scratched into a column. They were stacked in a neat five-by-five grid, and the stone had been sealed under volcanic ash since AD 79. Nobody could say who carved them, or why. A century later, nobody can. Five Words, Twenty-Five Letters Roman monumental lettering. The Sator Square was often scratched in much cruder form. Here's the square: S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S Read it left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top, and you get the same letters in the same order. It's a double palindrome, and the center word, TENET, is itself a palindrome sitting at the cr...