The Mystery of the Phrygian Valley

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

This is the first time our four-man expedition has come together - we have flown to Turkey to explore a number of ancient structures dating from the Hittites and Phrygians.

The find, which will be discussed, was made quite by accident: I’ll say right away that we did not look for and did not expect anything like this, and the only thing that connects it with the theme of the expedition itself is the location - the Phrygian Valley.

On a large stone plateau, we saw clearly artificial formations - the same tracks from the wheels, which went dozens of them in the same direction. All tracks are paired, so it is more correct to call them tracks. As it turned out later, these tracks are clearly visible on satellite images.

Fig 1. Satellite image of one of the track clusters.

Fig 2. One of the largest clusters - up to 30 tracks.

The tracks run both on the flat and level part of the plateau, and on the more difficult terrain - they cross the hills, pass between them and right along them. They intersect, sometimes converge or diverge.

Fig 3. Several tracks come together to disperse again after twenty meters.

Rice 4. "Food as I want"

The place that interested us the most was the track that passed between two hills. The wheel tracks in it are no different from dozens of their neighbors, but it is in this place that we find tracks on the walls of the hills, which tell us a lot of interesting things about the characteristics of the vehicle that left them.

Fig. 5, 6. Deep rut between two hills without traces of the vehicle getting stuck.

The photographs clearly show how both walls are formed - they are even, as if cut off, and their width is slightly wider than the track itself.

On both walls there are symmetrical blocks of scratches, pressed by a kind of trapezoidal protrusion, which was located on both sides of the vehicle.

Fig 7. The scratches are strictly at the same height, forming a very even straight line from beginning to end.

Fig 8. It is difficult to reproduce the trapezoidal shape of the scratches in the photograph, but the depth and relief are visible

Although at first glance the scratches seem rather untidy, two surprising facts can be observed: each single scratch can be traced along the entire length of the wall, and the entire block of scratches itself is extremely even in height along the entire length.

It soon turned out that the tracks between the two hills were not yet the most interesting find - they could compete with the prints that we found near a cluster of ruts, where the rock, unfortunately, was much worse preserved. This find was rectangular imprints in stone, slightly less deep than the rest of the tracks. The prints were in the immediate vicinity of the ruts.

Fig 9. Mysterious rectangles in the immediate vicinity of the ruts.

Fig 10. A fairly deep (15 cm) track mark behind it.

Fig 11. In this frame, the footprint most resembles a rectangular footprint.

It is difficult to say something for sure about these rectangles - the rock has significantly weathered, and it is impossible to determine how even they were. Nearby there are ruts, which are also significantly destroyed, and sometimes they have completely crumbled, ground has been applied on top and grass is growing. The only thing that came to mind was the places where the cargo was removed from the vehicles and placed next to it, and an indirect confirmation of this - the dimensions of the rectangles fully corresponded to the maximum size of the cargo, which would comfortably fit on vehicles with such an axle width and wheel thickness that has all ruts.

After returning from Turkey, the first thing we started doing was searching for all possible information about the formations we found, starting, of course, from the Internet.

On the Internet, we were not even expected to be disappointed … but an extreme surprise: in the entire network we found only one photo of exactly these ruts with the signature that these ruts were cut by the wheels of Phrygian carts.

There were millions of records about stone tracks in Malta (I’ll say right away that we are dealing here with fundamentally different formations and it is simply pointless to compare these tracks with the Maltese ones).

We and our colleagues found several materials dedicated to this region of Anatolia, including specifically devoted to ancient roads - and the result is almost zero. The only thing that can be learned from these works is that there were roads in this area, and despite the mass of graphic material (including architectural monuments located at a distance of 300-500 meters from the nearest tracks), there was not a single photograph of such amazing and preserved traces.

Fig 12. Aslankaya is one of the most famous monuments in the Phrygian Valley.

From it to the nearest footprints no more than six hundred meters.

It turns out that scientists do not know about these tracks? Or they know and for some reason do not even bother to attach photographs or at least images from satellites to their scientific works, even if these works are directly related to roads … But we did not find roads - these tracks do not form roads, we found groups of them here and there, these groups often run perpendicular to each other!

In a special program, we examined satellite images covering about six hundred square kilometers (an area of 20x30 km) around the tracks, finding all the visible clusters - no system was outlined.

The increase in the area of analysis led to the localization of the area where traces can be found: this is a strip about 65 kilometers long and up to 5 kilometers wide - it would seem that the direction of the tracks lies in front of us, but the tracks themselves almost never went in the direction of the strip itself, and even vice versa - we cannot talk about the length of 65 kilometers, judging by the direction of the tracks, it is easier for us to talk about such a huge width.

If archaeologists know about this, then it is not surprising that they are not interested in such formations - after all, they do not want to fit into the standard system.

While some were looking for articles on archeology, others were studying geology. It was possible to find out that the rock in which there are traces is the volcanic tuff of the Miocene period (this means that the volcanic activity in the region ended more than five million years ago).

Fig 13. Simplified geological map of the study area. The area in which the agglomeration of traces was found is highlighted in orange. All rocks in the study area belong to the Miocene and are mainly pyroclastic rocks (tuffs), limestone rocks, and occasionally granites. The ruts, apparently, were formed only in tuffs. You can study the map here (Turkish).

By this time, we already knew for sure the main question about our find.

What and when was able to roll such tracks?

In order to start answering this question, you probably need to write down the possible versions, and then gradually discard those that do not match.

1. Natural (geological) origin.

2. It was crushed by heavy equipment in the last hundred years, for example, during one of the world wars.

3. Rolled by Phrygian carts several thousand years ago.

4. Rolled in clay-soft stone.

Let's deal with all the versions in order

Version 1. Natural origin

I did not choose this option by chance - the natural origin is often attributed to the ruts in Malta, and in Turkey we often observed geological formations of amazing beauty and geometry.

It is enough to look at the agglomeration of tracks from space, so that there is no doubt about the technogenicity, and of course our favorite place - between two hills - leaves no doubt about its artificial origin, we add to this intersections at acute angles and rectangular traces from the load, and you can safely put this version on the shelf.

However, to be honest, I will mention one observation that could come in handy in this version: we did not find pronounced places where the start, end of the ruts, sharp turns or reversing points were found. For example, even in my favorite track between the hills, there is not a hint of traffic jam, and on the ascents (or descents, because the direction is almost impossible to determine) there are no traces of slipping.

Version 2. Modern heavy equipment.

This version became one of the main ones after it was not possible to find the necessary information of a historical and archaeological nature in open sources.

Tuff is a relatively soft stone, its compressive strength is 100-200 kg / cm2, which, when calculated based on the contact spot of a wheel of 100 cm2, will give us the required weight of at least 40-80 tons of weight (for the status quo) and much a large weight to break the rock to such a depth (unfortunately, to calculate the exact weight, a calculation in the field of strength is necessary, there were no specialists among us).

Suppose that for pushing through we need only 80 tons, even then the required load will be twice the load of the most enduring KAMAZ - and it already has 12 wheels, which are obviously wider than our tracks, and the rear ones are double.

If we apply the calculation of the load on tuff for KAMAZ, we get 35 kg / cm2, which is 3-6 times less than the required load for rock destruction.

That is, a wheeled vehicle with such a load on inflated wheels most likely does not exist.

A tracked vehicle is excluded at once for several reasons:

• The distribution of weight on the tracks is much more even than on the wheels - this is exactly the property that gives tanks such cross-country ability, but we have deep ruts.
• The tracks on the tracks leave characteristic chips on the hard surface - and we didn't find any tread marks.
• When moving in an arc, the tracked vehicle would slightly destroy the wall (and even the track) opposite to the direction of rotation - in our case, there was no such damage.

The most important argument against the version of the modern origin is the even and even smooth lines of the tracks - if the tracks were pressed by the heaviest tractor, they would crumble and crack (tuff is quite fragile), large pieces would break off from them, the intersections of the tracks would be broken and filled up debris. All this is not.

Version 3. Phrygian carts

I think that for any historian or archaeologist, this version is not only the most logical, but also axiomatic - it simply does not need confirmation.

The logical chain is really simple here.

1) There is no doubt that carts drove in the Phrygian valley

2) Obviously, if you drive along one place a lot of times, a track will form. When the track has become so deep that it is difficult to drive on it, they begin to drive not far from it, gradually rolling in new and new tracks.

1. With the fact that the carts were - no doubt about it, there are figurines and bas-reliefs in museums. But carts travel on the roads - and those groups of footprints that we found least of all deserve the name "road".

What are the characteristics of the roads?

Roads have a direction - In our case, there is no single direction of the "road" - on an area of several square kilometers we have several agglomerations, each of which has quite a lot of ruts.

Roads are made optimal - they should be straight where possible, level, where you can find a level place, it is necessary to avoid sharp ups and downs.

In our case, there is very little optimality - we found a place where neighboring tracks go under a hill, over a hill, along its edge and next to it, as if it was absolutely all the same whether to cross an extra hill or not, and the precedent with driving between two hills, in which there was a risk of getting stuck between them or simply destroying the structure of the cart in general, outrageous - meanwhile, a few meters away there are several ruts that bypassed this depression.

Roads are being repaired - if the optimal route is chosen, it will not be abandoned, if it is possible to use it further. In our case, no traces of repair were found. But there is nothing easier than filling a too deep track with broken tuff and continuing to use it as a new one. There is enough broken tuff around, you just need to invent a shovel or even a simple broom.

In the end, they build roads! Of course, if we have a stone plateau in front of us, construction on it is not necessary, but the stone is not everywhere. Where the rock passes into the ground, there should be a road - from flat stones or paving stones, from pebbles or wood.

If the carts left deep traces in the stone, and even dozens of parallel ones, then I can't even imagine what would become of the soft ground if there was no equipped road on it - most likely after a short time it would be impossible to drive, the carts would drowned in the torn up soil and without construction, they would have to roll out tracks in parallel, not in tens, but in thousands.

We did not find a single fragment of construction, not a single place that could claim to be a dirt road of antiquity, we did not find anything outside the tuff.

Summing up: we did not find the optimum in choosing a place for the tracks, did not find traces of repairs, did not find traces of road construction, and most importantly, we did not find the main property of the road - the general direction.

2. The very characteristics of the tracks do not allow them to be considered rolled over many years!

To begin with, let's figure out how the tracks should look like, which are rolled in a stone by a cart without shock absorbers (after all, no one would argue that there were no shock absorbers 2-4 thousand years ago?).

1) A particular track should have approximately the same depth wherever the density of the rock is approximately the same.

If you are driving on tuff, then there is no "dry place" in it like in clay, it will wear off more or less evenly, and the dependence will be more on the angle of inclination than on the place.

2) The bottom of the track cannot be even.

You, of course, have seen holes on asphalt roads and probably noticed that at first a small pothole or even a crack forms, then day after day it grows and deepens, turning into a pothole, and all this at a time when the asphalt looks almost like New.

The physics of this process is very simple - when a pothole is formed, each wheel that falls into it beats against it with a force much greater than the pressure on smooth asphalt. The surface is already damaged, and the wheels are constantly knocking on it, which causes further destruction of the asphalt, which at some point begins to grow exponentially.

The destruction is suspended when the pit becomes so deep that they are already afraid to drive through it, or when the brave road workers make a patchwork.

It is these processes that will occur in the rut - as soon as the first pothole is formed in one of the tracks of the track - every time a wheel passes along it - it will beat against its bottom, while the cart will slightly tilt towards the track where the pothole formed. The more wheels pass, the deeper the pothole will become, the wider the track will become in this place.

So - the bottom of the track should eventually look like a washboard, and the sides bulge in different directions.

3) Intersections at sharp corners cannot maintain any shape.

The physics that will act on intersections (except for intersections at angles close to a straight line, and we found only one of these) is very similar to the physics of potholes: a cart, approaching an intersection, would break the thinnest (and therefore fragile) sections with its wheels, and instead of even corners, we would have seen something shapeless, smoothed. And the fewer the guides for the wheels, the more the walls of the intersection would collapse, turning it into a fairly flat place with several entrances and exits. At the same time, all the tracks approaching the intersection would be much wider at the point of entry to the intersection than the average track, because after leaving the intersection, the cart would not always accurately hit the target of the desired track and, again, the wheel beat against the walls, grinding and chipping their. Even if the new track crosses the old, no longer used, we should see identical damage, only the entry-exit of the old track will not be widened.

And once again, in short: the track that the cart has rolled over a long time should have a similar depth along its entire length, it will have a hilly bottom, curved walls, and when crossing with other tracks there will be a rather broken intersection.

All this is not present in our case. Firstly, we have places where the ruts become less deep - and usually everything that is in this place, although the breed has not changed. Even if this is attributed to the high density of tuff in a particular place, this cannot explain this photograph in any way:

Fig 14. The mound is pushed along the very edge - like a pile of sand, along the edge of which a tractor drove, pushing it a little.

Secondly, wherever the tracks are well preserved, we have a very flat bottom. In fact, the bottom is phenomenally flat, no regular potholes have been found anywhere - and this is provided that the tuff is fragile: one hit with a hammer - and large pieces will fly around.

Thirdly, almost all intersections with sharp corners have a high safety of intersections - no breaks, no widened exit tracks.

Fig 15. Very smooth edges and sharp corners

Fig 16. Macro photo of the previous intersection. The curvature formed by the bottom and side wall of the track has a radius of less than 5 mm. Unfortunately, we didn’t think of throwing a coin there for accurate fixing of the dimensions.

In order not to be unfounded, speaking about archaeologists and historians, I contacted Professor Jeffrey Summers, who specializes in the routes of communication of ancient Turkey. What he wrote about these roads is exactly the same as the logic above:

"The carts and chariots would have had iron tires, at least some of them. The ruts continue to be made until they are so deep that the axle hits the ridge between. Where there is space new tracks are made along the same route."

"The carts and chariots had iron rims, at least some of them. The ruts continued to be used until they became so deep that the carts began to cling to the axle. A new path was made in a vacant place along the same road."

All this allows us to say with confidence - the tracks that we have are not the remnants of the roads that archaeologists talk about.

Version 4. Soft stone

If we assume that the ruts appeared when the stone was still soft, all the contradictions of the physical and logical properties disappear.

We no longer need to consider this place a road - just a dozen other carts drove on the clay, nothing particularly remarkable - the same thing can be seen along the fields in the summer season. At the same time, all the tracks that were rolled not over the stone, but over the ground, have long disappeared, to look for the remnants of them - how to look for last year's snow.

It is also not necessary to roll such ruts for years, judging by our observations - most of them were rolled at one time, some were driven two or three times.

All misunderstandings with a flat bottom, walls and sharp intersections without traces of destruction at intersections immediately disappear - with a single passage, everything should look exactly as in our photographs. Cracks and chips in a soft stone should also not appear.

The traces from the cargo, which are mentioned at the beginning of the article, are also quite logical - if a heavy box was removed from the transport, then it may well leave behind a squeezed trail in soft soil.

But despite the fact that the contradictions with physics are removed completely, new contradictions appear - with geology and history.

In what cases could the stone be soft?

For example, some time after the eruption, but the eruptions in the area ended more than five million years ago.

The second option, which was expressed by the author of our expedition, was that tuff erupted at the bottom of the lake, cooled down and formed a very loose bottom; later the water left, the lake turned into a swamp, then into clay, and then it was completely frozen. In this case, tuff could have been soft for much longer, maybe even up to our time. But only if there was clay 2-4 thousand years ago (which did not have time to solidify over millions of years), then surely there would still be places in which it did not solidify - for example, next to a lake or river. We traveled all over the area - there are no swamps here, all the tuff is equally hard, even the one on the shore of the nearest lake (from footprints to the lake - from 700 meters to 15 kilometers).

It turns out that in both cases the tuff froze much earlier than 2-4 thousand years ago. Some areas of tuff are severely damaged and weathered, which also indicates a significantly older age.

Even more interesting

It can take a long time and tastefully to come up with hypotheses about what kind of vehicle drove around the non-petrified tuff many millions of years ago, so I would like to leave it to the will of the reader. Instead of hypotheses, I want to add some more interesting facts and observations that we made over the two days that we examined the tracks.

Where are the animal prints?

We looked for prints of animals or humans along the tracks, but did not find them. Even where the tracks were perfectly preserved, we did not see any, even the most superficial dents.

There is nothing between the tracks that would remind of who pulled the cart, and even quite the opposite - there are places where the area between the wheels has such a shape that we walked along them with caution - curved, at an angle, sometimes just shapeless areas.

Fig. 17. It is dangerous for even a person to walk in this place, and a horse pulling a heavy cart can easily break its legs.

Let me remind you that we found unusual rectangular prints, as if from a cargo removed from carts, in one of the regions - however, there the level of erosion is such that we could not determine around the traces of a person or an animal. For the same reason, it is impossible to draw conclusions about the shape and quality of the inner corners in rectangles.

Fig 18. Despite the erosion - on the next expedition we will definitely look for footprints here again.

Independent suspension

The assumption about a possible independent suspension arose after we left: the impressions were still fresh and I went over everything that we saw in my head and felt that there was something else that we had not paid enough attention to.

At some point, I remembered that among the ruts there was also one that passed with one wheel along the top of the hill, and with the second one thirty centimeters lower - along its side. The track was vertical! A cart with a rigid suspension simply could not leave a vertical track - a difference of 30 centimeters with an axis width of 180 centimeters would give an angle of 11 degrees.

Fig. 19. Schematic representation of the cart (the thickness and height of the wheels, the width of the axle and the difference in height of the hill are observed; the depth of the tracks is increased for clarity).

On the left is an ordinary cart with a brutal suspension, leaving a vertical trail.

In the center - an ordinary cart leaves a trail on a hill with a height difference of 30 cm.

On the right, an independent suspension vehicle leaves a vertical track.

Confirmation of this version will not only (and for the umpteenth time!) Change our understanding of the complexity of the vehicle, but will also be weighty additional proof that the tracks are rolled at one time (otherwise the depth, the width of the lower track should be higher - after all, on it had much more mass of the cart).

Unfortunately, among the photographs and video footage taken, I did not find the very hill that would confirm this version, so for now we will leave it as a hypothesis, confirmation or refutation of which we will try to find in the next expedition.

Photos

In the previous part of the article, the photos were "to the point", but so much material has accumulated that I decided to add them to the article.

Fig. 20. The mountains around are weathered - filling the ruts with soil in which stunted shrubs grow.

Fig. 21. Crossing the tracks at an acute angle

Figure 22. Turning characteristics

Fig. 23. A narrow track, three times narrower than the others, and most importantly - unpaired, as if someone rode a motorcycle or even a bicycle; it is impossible to determine the presence or absence of a protector here.

Fig. 24. Just five hundred meters from the perfectly preserved tuff, we found a heavily eroded rock.

Figure 25. Track from double rolling on one track. On the right, the wall is even, and on the left, the wall was pressed through. It is noticeable that the pressed soil slightly increased the depth of the left track.