Located on the Greek Island of Euboea lies a true archaeological mystery: 25 massive structures called Drakóspita or Dragon houses. Erected using supermassive limestone blocks forming a pyramid-shaped roof, the mysterious dragon houses are a true ancient enigma. Experts are unsure who built them, how they were built, but most importantly, experts have no idea when they were built.

The dragon houses (in Greek Drakospita) are 20 large buildings spread across the south of the island of Euboea, the sixth largest in the Mediterranean, located off the eastern coast of mainland Greece.

The so-called Dragon houses are rectangular constructions composed of huge stones, built in a cyclopean style, placed one above the other without any type of mortar.

The spaces between them are filled with other smaller stones, and the roof is covered with equally large stone plates leaving a gap for the entrance of light.

The best preserved Dragon houses are those located on Mount Ochi , in the southeast of the island. Three other Cyclopean Dragon Houses can be found at Palli-Lakka and in Kapsala.

Despite the fact that they are called Dragon houses, the massive structures don’t really have anything to do with these mythological creatures.

They are dubbed Dragon houses because the local tradition attributed to their creators unknown superhuman powers, given the size of the stone blocks used in the building process. Ordinary people could not have built these massive structures, right?

Their true age remains a mystery, just as their unknown builders.

Although ‘Dragon Houses’ were first described at the end of the 18th century, there is still no exact dating of the buildings.

Some scholars believe that they can be traced back to the seventh century BC, being the precursors of the later Greek temples.

Others consider them defensive constructions of the Hellenistic period, of the III-IV century BC.

However, experts are still unable to agree on their date, and the lack of materials surrounding the massive structures has made the job more difficult.

The Dragon houses were ‘found’ by British geologist John Hawkins, who ascended Mount Ochi (1,398 meters of altitude) on October 21, 1797.

There, he found a construction that he inspected and from which he drew sketches, concluding, based on their design that the massive structures should be older than classic Greek temples.

After word got out of the existence of massive structures in the Mediterranean, many others ventured out to Greece to see the ‘Dragon houses’ for themselves.

In the following years after Hawkins discovered them, numerous archaeologists visited the site, such as Heinrich Ulrichs, who published a monograph about the structures in 1842.

In more recent times the main researchers are those of the Americans Jean Carpenter and Dan Boyd.

The enigmatic Dragon Houses of Mount Ochi are located at an altitude of 1386 meters of and have an average dimension of 12.7 by 7.7 meters, with a door in the center of the south wall, 2 meters high by one wide and crowned by a huge 10-tonne lintel protruding above it, as well as small windows on the sides.

The walls have an average thickness of 1.4 meters, suitable to support the heavy stone roof, and the interior rises to an average height of around 2.4 meters.

The surface of the construction is 48 square meters and the entire floor is covered with stone panels.

As noted by experts, the three Dragon Houses of Palli-Lakka are very similar in dimensions to that of Mount Ochi, but the walls are less thick, only 1.1 meters on average.

The stone blocks used are smaller and, in general, the style is more rustic, less elaborate and possibly even older.

The strange things is that, despite their supermassive size and intricate design elements, there is absolutely no reference to these buildings in the ancient sources, so all the available information comes from the legends and folklore of the area where they were built, as well as details of explorers who have visited the structures in more recent times.

In 1959, excavations were carried out on the structures of Mount Ochi which brought to light ceramic fragments which have been dated to the Hellenistic period.

Archaeologists also found various reinforcements, on one of which they fund a small text written in an unknown script, which is now kept at the archaeological museum of Karystos.

An Otherworldly Connection?

Interesting details were discovered in 2002 and 2004 when researchers from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Athens studied the orientation of the Dragon Houses on Mount Ochi. Experts came to the conclusion that the Dragon Houses were oriented to the Sirius star system around 1100 BC., suggesting that the mysterious Cyclopean structures may have been used as some sort of astronomical observatories.

However, due to the lack of more exhaustive data, the Greek Dragon houses continue to be an enigma for archaeologists.

As noted by some authors, the mysterious structures could well be the key to understanding the evolution of later Greek architecture.

Whatever their purpose was, it remains a mystery as to how the massive structures were built, how they have remained standing, and most importantly their exact age.

Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The Southwestern United States is home to countless ancient figurines, depicting beings with elongated heads, halos, antennas, almond-shaped eyes, and even what some interpret as beings in astronaut-like space suits. These figurines were created around 4,000 years ago.

In the southwestern United States, mainly in the state of Utah, there is a great concentration of places where thousands of years ago, early inhabitants depicted strange beings with elongated heads, massive height, and helmet-like objects, as well as a number of depictions of what many authors have identified as cosmic maps.

The enigmatic figures date back 1,500 and 4,000 years ago, although some could be older, while others figurines could have been created as recently as one thousand years ago.

But it doesn’t matter whether they were created four thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago, what matters is the message that the ancients tried conveying.

One of the greatest enigmas that experts have tried solving is the meaning of the figures painted on countless rocks in Utah.

Are these mysterious representations the result of ancient man’s ingenuity? Imagination? Are these figures depictions of ancient abstract art? Or is it possible, as some authors suggest, that these mysterious beings were the so-called sky people?

The most famous of all panels is located in the Horseshoe Canyon, formerly known as Barrier Canyon, west of the Verde River in the state of Utah.

The rock art at horseshoe canyon is known as Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) rock art.

The Great Gallery

The Great Gallery is a spectacular ancient art panel of more than 60 meters in length by about 5 of height in which are represented some 20 anthropomorphic images of natural size, the largest of which exceeds 2 meters in height.

The so-called great gallery is divided into two differentiated areas, so that the most separated representations, on the left, are known as the Panel of the Holy Spirit, due to the presence of an unusual-looking figure that some identity with a spirit and others with some shamanic ritual.

The Holy Ghost panel of the Great Gallery has been dated to between 400 A.D. and 1100 A.D. by dating two rockfall events of which one exposed the rock face the panel was made and the second damaging part of the panel

This gallery offers the largest and best-preserved collections of Barrier Canyon Style rock art in the United States.

This panel has been dated by optically stimulated luminescence between 400 and 1100 AD.

According to experts, the pictograms of the Great Gallery were made using ocher-red color to represent more than 80 figures, whose meaning remains a profound enigma.

The creation and dating of the figurines is also a problematic issue for experts because the pigments used by the ancients lacks organic material and cannot be analyzed by radiocarbon dating.

The rock art of the great gallery is believed to have been the product of the Desert Archaic culture, a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers predating the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans.

12 kilometers northwest of Persepolis, in the Fars Province in Iran, lie the magnificent ancient ruins of the Naqsh-e Rustam necropolis.

The ancient Necropolis is home to four tombs of the Achaemenid kings, carved on the perpendicular cliffs of the mountain. The tombs are sometimes known as the Persian crosses, after the shape of the facades of the tombs.

The Necropolis is home four rock-cut monuments which stand out for their size, with a cruciform aspect and with great reliefs carved in their superior and inferior parts, all excavated following a model of the Egyptian Hypogeums.

Of the four, the oldest one bares inscriptions, thanks to which scholars have been able to find it is the tomb of Darius I, the third king of the Achaemenid dynasty, who ruled the empire between 521 and 486 BC., and who was defeated by the Athenians and their allies at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.

One of the fragments of the inscription says:

“Adam darayavaush khshaya-thiya vazraka khshayathiya/khshayathi-yanam… parsa parsahya puthra ariya ariyachithra.”

“I, Darius, the great king, the king of kings… a Parsi, the son of a Parsi, an Aryan of Aryan family.” (source)

However, the remaining three tombs are as majestic as that of King Darius.

All four thumbs are similar in form and appearance, but since none presents inscriptions archaeologists can only speculate on who they may have been built for.

The most accepted hypothesis is that the remaining three tombs belonged to Xerxes I (the son of Darius), Artaxerxes I and Darius II.

The entrance to each of the tombs is located at high altitude right in the center of the cross.

Inside, a chamber houses the sarcophagus with the remains of the king.

The ancient necropolis features a fifth tomb, of the same typology that remains unfinished, and that may have been built for Artaxerxes III or Darius III, the last of the Achaemenids, defeated by Alexander the Great in the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC: and murdered days later by his satraps.

According to scholars, the majestic reliefs that adorn the exterior of the tombs were made in later times by the Sassanids during the Second Persian Empire (226-651 AD), and represent outstanding war scenes of different sovereigns such as Narsés, Sapor I, Ormuz II, Bahram II and Ardashir I.

But the tombs carved out of the mountain, and the majestic reliefs aren’t the only magical details of the necropolis.

The facades of the tombs also have amazing architectural decorations on the columns that form a kind of portico similar to those of Persepolis itself.

Archaeologists believe that the entrances had to be closed after each burial, these being destroyed and the interior looted in later times following Alexander.

The tombs include other architectural elements.

The Ka’ba-ye Zartosht—the “Cube of Zoroaster”

Located around forty-five meters from rock-cut tombs we find the Cube of Zoroaster (Ka’ba-ye Zartosht), a small construction erected during the 5th century BC., built in the form of a tower 14 meters high that may have had a ritual function, or keeping the flame of eternal fire burning.

Some Iranian scholars believe that it served as a storehouse for religious books and royal documents.

This structure features on three sides trilingual inscriptions in Persian Sassanian, Parthian, and Greek, which constitute the most important historical document of the Sassanid era.

The ancient Necropolis of Naqsh-e Rustam was excavated for several seasons between 1936 and 1939 by a team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, led by Erich Schmidt.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons