A giant pyramid hidden inside a mountain
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Wikipedia has a good image showing the sizes of different pyramids compared: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Comparis...
Note that Cholula has the largest base, but isn't the tallest.
Is there a common definition those buildings fullfill? Or are they on the graph for scale?
"A pyramid (from Greek: πυραμίς pyramis)[1][2] is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single point at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_(geometry):
"In geometry, a pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. [...] When unspecified, a pyramid is _usually_ assumed to be a regular square pyramid"
Note the _usually_.
If you shrink a side elevation of the Shard to 10% of its actual height, it looks like an eight-storey tall pyramid: http://imgur.com/a/Vslkl
I too didn't realize that this was possible in SVGs. It's awesome.
Ignore that the Wikipedia page currently calls it "a recommended means[1][2][3] of animating SVG-based hypermedia" (lol). It's a complex feature that browsers have been dragging along for years while nobody's using it. Though it seems that Chrome is finally taking the initiative of dropping support, or at least discouraging its use.
There's no reason to do a roughshod job exposing them.
Not in global terms. Genghis and his Mongol army allegedly despatched up to hundreds of thousands to over a million people each in campaigns such as in Nishapur, Merv and Urgench, in the 13th century.
Who knows if we'll ever get accurate numbers, but it's one of the most gruesome period of human history. The institutional hate towards Ghengis only disappeared in the 20th century.
When I first heard about that pyramid, I was a little confused because it took me a while to realize this.
- the spanish continuously built church temples on top of the natives' pyramids. Like a cruel switch of religions. The Mexico City Basilica sits on top of aztec ruins.
> Certainly, by the time Cortéz and his men arrived, it was already a thousand years old and entirely concealed by vegetation.
Constructing religious buildings on top of pre-existing ones, or repurposing them, is about signalling evolution and domination, about co-opting sensibilities. Christian basilicas in a lot of cases were born as Roman civil buildings, altered to suit the new religion; Hagia Sophia, the Pantheon and a number of other religious buildings were "switched" between religions at various points; and it's fairly common for churches to be built on top of "pagan" shrines.
It's like religious festivities "curiously" overlapping pre-existing celebrations, or saints exhibiting characteristics typical of other faiths: one way for new cults to achieve legitimacy is by repurposing existing elements and claiming they fit a grand scheme from the beginning. In a way, both Christianity and Islam do it right from their holy texts.
It also may be cheaper to build on top of an existing foundation, or the location an existing church stands on simply may be one of the few locations one can build a heavy building on. In some regions (e.g. peat areas) solid ground or even ground that is solid less than ten meters below ground level can be hard to come by.
For example, "The location of Viracocha's palace was chosen for the purpose of removing the Inca religion from Cusco, and replacing it with Spanish Catholic Christianity." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cusco_Cathedral#Basilica_Cathe...
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianized_sites .
But again context: from antiquity to the modern era, when civilizations clash, one dominates the other and you don't get just 'parts' of the new administration. You get agriculture, domestication of animals, the new science, literacy, 'medicine', ideas, civil administration and religion. Not just one thing. And by this time Christianity and Buddhism also represented a huge step forward in metaphysical though vis-a-vis polytheistic and animist religions previous to them. People forget that religions are not 'arbitrary' - they represent the metaphysical thinking of the era. Religions in the Common Era were often founded with moral principles regarding good behaviour, charity, selflessness etc., as opposed to thinking of 'those above' as merely a soap-opera of superhuman like people, with human like characteristics, as in many of the pre-Common Area faiths. I'm not advocating it, I'm describing the context.
My family members go down to Central America every year to help build homes. I'll bet in 200 years, academics of the era will look upon that as some kind of 'cultural destruction' as well (i.e. putting people into brick homes instead of 'native huts') - but again I think that description would lack context. We look at history through our own cultural order, which is I think a problem sometimes.
snovv_crash believed it was similar to reusing marble from the Coliseum to build St. Peter's.
toyg pointed out that why it isn't similar.
User 'Someone' thought reuse was more to do with pragmatism.
I reaffirmed that it was deliberate Spanish/church practice. (Other religions do the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_non-Muslim_place... )
I fail to see the need for a larger context, at least not when it contains so many topics which have nothing to do with the given thread, and with flamebait topics like the proposition that Jesus was not a "superhuman like" person who could perform miracles and walk on water, or that Muhammad did not split the moon.
+ We're talking about where and why the new temples were built. 'Why' there were built there is a pretty important part of the overall question.
+ My proposition was to support the theory that they were built there for geopolitical reasons, not architectural reasons, and I gave some reasoning behind why this was - and to contextualize the misplaced statement regarding a 'cruel switch of religions'
+ You're not reading my comments regarding religion correctly - they are an historical articulation of the social development of religion based on evolving metaphysical premises, specifically from pre-Common Era polytheistic faiths to Common Era faiths, and it has nothing to do with what 'magical' those people happen to believe.
Oh please - this is really out of context.
'The Coliseum' was a place of mass murder, moreover, at the time that any materials may have been salvaged or 're-purposed' nobody in the world was concerned about the historical significance of much at all.
There seem to be the larger one in Europe - Bosnia: http://piramidasunca.ba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims
"He believes the Mesoamerican pyramids and Egyptian pyramids are built by the same people as the Visočica hill... Osmanagić wishes to excavate in order to "break a cloud of negative energy, allowing the Earth to receive cosmic energy from the centre of the galaxy""
"We, the undersigned professional archaeologists from all parts of Europe, wish to protest strongly at the continuing support by the Bosnian authorities for the so-called "pyramid" project being conducted on hills at and near Visoko. This scheme is a cruel hoax on an unsuspecting public and has no place in the world of genuine science."
His gobbeldegook about cosmic energy is a lot more fun and a shorter quote, so I went with that instead.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/shaenamontanari/2016/04/18/that-...
Two or maybe three are fine. The rest is total shit, though.