The hidden Pyramid in Indonesia

 
The image you see above may be that of an overgrown, 20 000 year old Pyramid. Or it may not be. The jury is still out. I present it as a possibility, not as a fact.
It`s location is at the largest megalithic site of Indonesia, Mount Padang:


Sure, just because a hill has the shape of a pyramid does not make it one. I would have dismissed it, were it not not for the surrounding megaliths and the fact that scientists and even Government officials have openly spoken of a 9000 to 20 000 year old civilization (controversially contradicting the prevailing “we are the first civilization” doctrine) and are themselves trying to find out whether there is a pyramid hidden beneath the hill.
An article by the Sydney Morning Herald on the controversial megalithic site says:
…Gunung Padang has been known (though not widely) as the largest of a number of ancient megalithic sites in Indonesia.
Here our prehistoric forebears, moved by the area’s strikingly shaped columns of volcanic rock, built terraces into the mountaintop and arranged and stacked the stones for whatever indiscernible purpose motivated them.
And Hilman thinks there is much more to it under the surface. If he’s right – and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is enthusiastically encouraging his investigations – then buried beneath the piles of ancient stone is by far the oldest pyramid on the planet.
Hilman says it could predate the next oldest by a dozen millenniums or more, suggesting an advanced ancient civilisation in Java. ”It’s older than 9000 [years] and could be up to 20,000,” Hilman says, as he sits on a fallen column of stone. ”It’s crazy, but it’s data.’
Hilman, a senior geologist at Indonesia’s Centre for Geotechnical Research, believes that most of this 100 metre hill is actually man-made, built up on three stages over the millenniums by three different cultures.
If he is correct the find would rewrite prehistory in the same way as the discovery of a mini-human ”hobbit” on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores rewrote paleoanthropology…
In May, Hilman, who holds a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, was summoned to brief Yudhoyono on his findings. The President was so impressed that he appointed a government taskforce to investigate further, while Arif and Hilman continued with their work. President Yudhoyono urged haste, describing the team’s work as a ”task of history … of important value for humanity”. He even offered the services of the army’s earth-moving equipment.
Proving the authenticity of these ancient ruins among the banana palms and tea plantations of Cianjur has taken on the aura of a nationalistic quest.
A test being conducted on this day is one in a series of geo-electric surveys. Men in gumboots arrange long loops of yellow cable on huge columnar rocks denuded of their topsoil.
Hilman stands on the muddy edge and points out what he says are patterns in the arrangement of the rocks. These patterns reflect the geological testing already undertaken, he says – that stones usually found upright have been laid horizontally on beds of gravel. Some are stuck together by an ancient form of glue, he says. These have been carbon dated indicating the sites are well in excess of 9000 years old, he says.
Below this are walls he describes as rooms, internal steps and terraces, all evidence of a massive building, of human intelligence and planning.
”The structure of the building is very good, it’s been defined by many lines of the geo-electric surveys, even 3D, even GPR [ground-penetrating radar] … and core samples,” Hilman says. ”We conclude that the archaeological site, the arrangement of these columnar joints, has laminated the entire hill so it’s 100 metres thick. We also think it’s not just one layer of building, but multiple layers.” They may have discovered archaeological human structures or features to a depth of at least 15 metres.
”It’s huge,” Hilman says. ”People think the prehistoric age was primitive, but this monument proves that wrong.”
The remainder of the article, which I have not quoted in full length, goes into those who dispute the pyramid-theory.
Some images of the hand-carved megaliths at the site:




And some stones that are apparently in the Mountain itself and raise hopes of artificial construction:



One of the only western researcher who seems to be looking into this with any sincerity is Graham Hancock. These are snippets from an early article of his:
“Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong,” says Danny Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Centre for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. “Old stories about Atlantis and other a great lost civilizations of prehistory, long dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be proved true.”
I’m climbing with Dr Natawidjaja up the steep slope of a 300-ft high step-pyramid set amidst a magical landscape of volcanoes, mountains and jungles interspersed with paddy fields and tea plantations a hundred miles from the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia.
The pyramid has been known to archaeology since 1914 when megalithic structures formed from blocks of columnar basalt were found scattered amongst the dense trees and undergrowth that then covered its summit. Local people held the site to be sacred and called it Gunung Padang, the name it still goes by today, which means “Mountain of Light”, or “Mountain of Enlightenment”, in the local Sundanese language. The summit, where the megaliths were found arranged across five terraces had been used as a place of meditation and retreat since time immemorial, archaeologists were told, and again this remains true today.
However neither the archaeologists, nor apparently the locals realized the pyramid was a pyramid. It was believed to be a natural hill, somewhat modified by human activity, until Natawidjaja and his team began a geological survey here in 2011. By then the summit had long since been cleared and the megalithic terraces recognized to be ancient and man-made, but no radiocarbon dating was ever done and the previously accepted age of the site – about 1,500 to 2,500 BC — was based on guesswork rather than on excavations.
The first scientific radiocarbon dating was done by Natawidjaja himself on soils underlying the megaliths at or near the surface. The dates produced – around 500 to 1,500 BC – were very close to the archaeological guesswork and caused no controversy. However a surprise was in store as Natawidjaja and his team extended their investigation using tubular drills that brought up cores of earth and stone from much deeper levels.
First the drill cores contained evidence – fragments of columnar basalt – that man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates – 3,000 BC to 5,000 BC, then 9,600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then, 15,000 BC and finally at depths of 90 feet and more an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.
“This was not at all what my colleagues in the world of archaeology expected or wanted to hear” says Natawidjaja, who earned his PhD at Cal Tech in the United States and who, it becomes apparent, regards archaeology as a thoroughly unscientific discipline.
The problem is that those dates from 9,600 BC and earlier belong to the period that archaeologists call the “Upper Palaeolithic” and take us back deep into the last Ice Age when Indonesia was not a series of islands as it is today but was part of a vast southeast Asian continent dubbed “Sundaland” by geologists…
…”It is difficult,” Natawidjaja says, “for us to imagine what life on earth must have been like during the Younger Dryas. It was a truly cataclysmic period of immense climate instability and terrible, indeed terrifying, global conditions. It’s not surprising that many large animal species, such as the mammoths, went extinct during this precise time and of course it had huge effects on our ancestors, not just those ‘primitive’ hunter gatherers the archaeologists speak of but also, I believe, a high civilization that was wiped from the historical record by the upheavals of the Younger Dryas.”
What has brought Natawidjaja to this radical view is the evidence he and his team have uncovered at Gunung Padang. When their drill cores began to yield very ancient carbon dates from clays filling the gaps between worked stones they expanded their investigation using geophysical equipment – ground penetrating radar, seismic tomography and electrical resistivity – to get a picture of what lay under the ground. The results were stunning, showing layers of massive construction using the same megalithic elements of columnar basalt that are found on the surface but with courses of huge basaltic rocks beneath them extending down to 100 feet and more beneath the surface. At those depths the carbon dates indicate that the megaliths were put in place more than 10,000 years ago and in some cases as far back as 24,000 years ago…
…”The geophysical evidence is unambiguous,” Natawidjaja says. “Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we’re looking at the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one.”
“The archaeologists won’t like that,” I point out.
“They don’t!” Natawidjaja agrees with a rueful smile. “I’ve already got myself into a lot of hot water with this. My case is a solid one, based on good scientific evidence, but it’s not an easy one. I’m up against deeply entrenched beliefs.”
The next step will be a full-scale archaeological excavation. “We have to excavate in order to interrogate our remote sensing data and our carbon dating sequences and either to confirm or deny what we believe we’ve found here,” says Natawidjaja, “but unfortunately there’s a lot of obstacles in our way.”
When I ask what he means by obstacles he replies that some senior Indonesian archaeologists are lobbying the government in Jakarta to prevent him from doing any further work at Gunung Padang on the grounds that they “know” the site is less than 5,000 years old and see no justification for disturbing it.
“I don’t deny that the megaliths at the surface are less than 5,000 years old,” Natawidjaja hastens to add, “but I suggest they were put here because Gunung Padang has been recognized as a sacred place since time immemorial. It’s the deepest layers of the structure at between 12,000 and more than 20,000 years old that are the most important. They have potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of history and I think it’s vital that we be allowed to investigate them properly.”
The hypothetical Pyramid is, as of this time, pretty much being ignored outside of Indonesia. That’s why most of the websites I have consulted about it have to be run through the Google-Translator.
According to the Wikipedia site on Mount Padang…
On October 1, 2014, surveyors halted excavation activities temporarily due to these facts and recommendations:^[6]

• There is a large structure below the surface
• A core zone site area has been confirmed
• Many man-made artefacts have been discovered
• The construction of the site spans four eras
• A recommendation has been made to extent the survey, renovation concept, conservation and management of the site

Another view:


The most recent Graham Hancock update provides grounds for optimism (excerpts only):
…evidence of deeply buried man-made chambers and yielding carbon dates going back as far as 26,000 years. This was the last Ice Age when our ancestors are supposed (according to the orthodox archaeological model) to be have been nothing more than primitive hunter gatherers incapable of large-scale construction and engineering feats. Was it possible that geologist Natawidjaja was unearthing the proof of a lost advanced civilization of prehistoric antiquity? Such ideas are heresy to mainstream archaeologists and sure enough the archaeological establishment in Indonesia banded together against Dr Natawidjaja and his team, lobbied the political authorities, agitated locally and succeeded in slowing down, though not completely stopping, the further exploration of Gunung Padang.
Dr Natawidjaja fought back, doing some high-level lobbying of his own, taking the matter to the President of Indonesia himself. There were further delays to do with elections in Indonesia but just a couple of months ago, in mid-August 2014, the final obstacles were lifted and Dr Natawidjaja and his team moved back onto the Gunung Padang site with full approval to go ahead with their work, including permission to excavate the concealed chambers.
Archaeologists were furious and immediately began lobbying to get the work stopped – fortunately to no avail as preliminary excavations have produced results that prove beyond doubt that Gunung Padang in indeed a man-made pyramid of great antiquity as Dr Natawidjaja had long ago proposed. Even the relatively young layer so far excavated (the second artificial columnar rock-layer beneath the megalithic site visible on the surface) has yielded dates of 5200 BC (nearly 3000 years older than the orthodox dating for the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt) and there are firm indications from the original remote sensing and core drilling work of much older layers below. In short, it is now evident to all that the site is vastly older than the 2500 years that archaeologists had insisted upon for decades. Even the most hostile amongst them are therefore now reframing their assessment of the site and referring to it as “a gigantic terraced tomb, which was part of the biggest megalithic culture in the archipelago.”…
…As to the progress of the work at Gunung Padang, Dr Natawidjaja writes as follows:
“The research progress has been being great.  We have excavated three more spots right on top of the megalithic site in the past couple weeks, which give more evidence and details about the buried structures.  We have uncovered lots more stone artifacts from the excavations.  The existence of the pyramid-like structure beneath the megalithic site is now loud and clear; even for non-specialists, it is not too difficult  to understand if they come and see for themselves.    We have found some kind of open hall buried by soil 5-7 meters thick; however we have not yet got into the main chamber.  We are now drilling to the suspected location of the chamber (based on subsurface geophysic) in the middle of the megalithic site.”
Even if no Pyramid were ultimately found, terraced layers of four civilizations have been found, each older civilization more advanced than the more recent. That in itself is great news for Atlantis-Researchers because we have been saying all along that civilization has not evolved over the ages, it has declined (up until the last few hundred years).
As you`ll already have guessed, Indonesia too is rife with Atlantis- and Lemuria related legends of flying serpents, giants, dwarves, warring gods and all the usual suspects. Another amazing discovery in this regard were the remains of dwarves on the island of Flores. Indonesian “myths” are full of dwarves. And as you may have also guessed, any relation to mythology was dismissed in the press. Mainstream researchers provided the usual tired explanations about genetic illnesses that cause dwarfism, down syndrome and “deformed people”. The press publicized them as “Hobbits”, further masking the significance of the find (Google “Indonesia Dwarves” or “Indonesia Hobbit” to learn more).
A Javanese legend called “Aji Saka” (King Saka or “the Primordial King”) recounts how civilization came to the area. And that’s quite a different story than the official one according to which civilization started in the year 3oo.
Saka came from an unknown mythical land to bring civilization and order to Java. For that he first had to defeat evil Giants (denawa – giant demons) that ruled the Island. These giants were cannibalistic and destructive. The King of the Giants was called Dewata Cengkar. King Saka defeated him by pushing him into the Ocean.
The legend also tells of a giant snake that claimed to be Aki Sakas son. Aki Saka however said, that in order to become his son, he would have to fight on his side and kill a being called Bajul Putih, which appears to have been another serpentine creature. The giant snake did so and then became King Sakas son. Upon seeing that his new son greedily ate the domestic pets of his palace, he was expelled by the King and sent out into the jungle and tied to a rope. He was told that he would now only be able to eat what fell in his mouth. Other variations say that the snake was expelled into a cave.