Arkaim (Аркаим) is located south of Magnitogorsk in the Ural mountains (Russia). It is an ancient fortified settlement, consisting of two concentric circular walls with an observatory at its center. It has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. Carbon dating of some artifacts found there, place it at 3500-4000 BC, its true history, however, may extend much further back than this... at least 12,000 years old! Approximately at the time of the fall of Atlantis.
Like some other ancient cities, it has been laid out in the shape of a mandala or swastika, earning it the name of "swastika city". By chance or design, it happens to be at the same latitude as Stonehenge.
This is also a pretty interesting documentary about Arkaim, give it a watch...
The following text is a summary about Arkaim by Victoria LePage in the Nov-Dec 2008 issue of 'New Dawn Magazine'.
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile, paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell [The View Over Atlantis, 1975] cites the massive evidence for such a civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look. Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists, this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject, especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.
A Bronze Age Town in the Southern Urals
In 1987, in the middle of the Russian steppe, a team of Russian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a fortified town called Arkaim, causing great excitement in scientific ranks and a surge of neo-pagan and nationalist enthusiasm among Russian intellectuals. The region was known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse cultures, ranging from every epoch and every direction of the compass, but Arkaim was the first clear evidence of an ancient advanced culture flourishing on Russian soil.
Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious centre.
Plan of Arkaim
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about 3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled. Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.
Model of the fort and central observatory
A possible light was thrown for the first time on the development, nature and wide migratory pattern of early Indo-European culture, and stimulated all sorts of theories in Russian circles about the Aryan roots of the Slavic people.
This, however, has been only the beginning of the quest for a new ethnic, cultural and religious identity in a small but influential Russian minority since the demise of the Soviet Union. Increasingly rejecting the American and European vision of a global hegemony rooted in Western Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain. Many, especially among the young, are already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or Islam. Arkaim has become a ready focus for these ideals, a symbol of the future basis for world peace.
Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual are inseparable.
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard, the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as we shall see.
In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again become the centre of the world. However, the discovery of the settlement has opened a historical aperture onto far more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands, where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe. What the Land of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples – a past of such enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it solves.
Built in the unique architectural mould of nordic Asgard, the most sacred shrine of the Aesir of which the Prose Edda relates that “men call it Troy,” Arkaim may have been a shrine dedicated to the Aryan Sun religion, yet the roots of its dedication would have lain ultimately in the far older cult of the Pole star. Essentially, this was the religion of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and other wonder-workers in touch with the spirits of nature.
Thus the swastika, thought to be the exclusively Aryan symbol of sun-worship misappropriated by the Nazis, and found depicted on many of the clay pots unearthed in Arkaim, is an older religious and metaphysical symbol than that attached to the Aryan Sun God, its roots lying in totemic shamanism. René Guénon, the eminent French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolising eternal motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult, originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the Great Bear. This centre, Guénon stresses, “constitutes the fixed point known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which the world rotates…” The swastika is therefore known world-wide as the ‘sign of the pole.’
Swastika |
Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late expression of a megalithic Pillar religion that once reigned universally in every corner of the globe, among nearly all peoples, whatever their ethnic type, and which became associated with troy towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and goes back to the most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as revolving around the axis of the Pole Star.
Only later did the Sun, as the centre of the revolving stellar system, replace the Pole Star as the supreme deity of the Pillar cult and lead to the elevation of the Sun God of the Indo-European peoples. It led to their greater intellectual development, to complex civilisations, to advanced arts and sciences and the transcendence of nature.
Troy towns like Electris – and Arkaim – were built as stellar observatories. Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos above according to the principle of “as above so below” by means of a central axis symbolised by a stone pillar. Thus Diodorus Siculus of the first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres.
These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the ramparts. The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when hunter-gatherers still roamed the land. In time they will realize, human history on this planet is much older and much more complex than the illuminati controlled information in the history books we teach our children.
Thanks to the ProjectAvalon forum for the information...
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Wow, that is insane. Why have I never heard of this place before?
ReplyDeleteEven crazier is that it is the same latitude as Stonehenge.. makes me think that maybe there is something to it..
Well, there really is something to it... there is something to almost every thing like this on this planet that is made taboo and that is still, sadly, being ridiculed. I too wonder why I've just recently heard of Arkaim and not sooner...
ReplyDeletewell i always knew the world still have so many misteries in it no one knows about and even i am sure that are a lot that ppl keep in secret, but well in reality is good to know more info each day ! haha i like a lot to learn new things from time to time haha interesting!
ReplyDeleteIncreadible, i would love t visit this place.
ReplyDeleteSo many questions, so little way to find the answers, maybe one day we'll unravel the mystery!
ReplyDeleteWow this is fascinating.I cant believe i've never heard of this before.Really interesting article.
ReplyDeleteWoah, this is incredible! I'm one of the many who have never heard about this until now. Very enlightening :)
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of places which are very old and there is a lot of evidences that slavic history and culture has been sistematicly classified, because the knowledge could give freedom and enlightenment to the people and also can make humans from slaves. People which dont have knowledge and which think that our ancestors has been stupid can be much more easier controled and forced to do what the autorhity wishes. It started by comming of christianity and genocide of slavic people. My be it started before. Egipt, sumer, ... there is evidence that the native people where slavic autochton inhabitants and because they where exploited by alochton incomers (etrusk, egiptians, .....) the history was modified so its suits to the church and others...
ReplyDeletefind the truth for your self and please find the conscience and scrupulousness in your self, in your heart, look and see what is around, humiliation can be stoped if we care not for that suits to us but for what our consciesnce says to us. You have to find out difference in mean of good and bad and to be suitable and not to be suitable. some things that can be suitabe are realy bad .... open your eyes, mind and heart
ReplyDeletethis is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI've been trying a find a good documentary about this and not a single one from Nat Geo, Discovery, History or any other big channels like BBC exist.. why hasn't this been covered?
ReplyDelete