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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 08/18/2009 : 14:45:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by tw101356
Originally posted by Simon
Good job!
*Grumble; way younger than I thought too... Why didn't I thought about Easter civilizations? Grumble, grumble*
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Thank you.
I first thought it was of Roman origin, but it didn't look quite right. Romans would not have built the inner fortifications up against the outer wall, and would have had corner bastions to maximize the field of fire from ballistas. (Rectangular wall first, then add gatehouses, then add corner bastions, then additional wall bastions. Just didn't look Roman-style.)
Could not be an old population center that grew to this size because those evolve in an irregular fashion. Had to be a planned city created out of nothing by an intelligent designer. The terrain looked arid as well.
Thought about it for a bit, then reread Halfmooner's original post and subsequent hint.
..."stately"...poetry....lightbulb...Xanadu!
Then another 30 minutes locating it. That took a while because some jerk marketer from Porlock Credit Repair kept calling on the phone and interrupting me.
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That person from Porlock is such a buzz-killer, isn't he/she? I was afraid when I used the adjective "stately" as a clue in the OP, I'd given away too much. In retrospect, it seems it was just about right. Nice work, tw101356!
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 08/18/2009 : 15:35:26 [Permalink]
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| 't was a nice find too... |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 08/18/2009 : 15:35:42 [Permalink]
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For anyone interested, here's Wiki's article on Xanadu, known also as Shàngdu and Kaiping. Grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan had the city built for his summer palace and capital. Marco Polo visited Xanadu.
I haven't looked into this, but my guess is that the odd structure was due to the city walls being built in two stages, the smaller square first, then the enlarged square later as an afterthought, using two of the original walls as part of the new outer wall.
The first lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium-fueled poem, "Kubla Khan" are arguably among the most evocative lines of all English poetry. The unfinished poem begins:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
This is from a note Coleridge wrote about the poem: The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! |
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 08/18/2009 15:48:56 |
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What on Earth?: Dead City
