This incredible story might seem like a fantasy if it were not for one circumstance. Such data appeared in the literature several centuries before its discovery. Where could this information have come from? Such references are quite substantial evidence in themselves.
This story began in 2010. Russian historians reached out to their Armenian friends to find out more about what happened in 1939. At that time, a special commission in the residence of the Catholicos of all Armenians in Echmiadzin was preparing to transport ancient manuscripts to the capital of the republic – the city of Yerevan. One of those responsible for this work, a young historian from Moscow, Victor Arutyunyan, was an employee of the NKVD.
Victor kept a diary in which he detailed everything he saw. During the examination of the scrolls, Arutyunyan found some sort of a map in one of them. Upon closer inspection and reading the description, he was amazed to realize that it was a map of Mars! He was not an astronomer, but that’s what was written. Moreover, on the manuscript around Mars, a circle was drawn with a small dot on it, indicating the planet’s satellite!
However, the most important thing was missing in the document. There was no information about who and when had made this map. On the only page, besides the strange image, there was a small medieval text in Latin, which said that it was a translation of the ancient Egyptian original. Victor took the map with him to show it to his school teacher and then put it back in its place.
Optical lenses were known even in Ancient Egypt, but the satellites of Mars are so small that even Galileo in the early 17th century could not see them with his 32x telescope. These celestial bodies were only discovered in 1877 by the American astronomer Asaph Hall using a 66-centimeter telescope – the largest at that time – of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington.
The tiny moons were named Phobos and Deimos, which in Greek means “fear” and “dread”. Astronomers suggested that the small size could indicate that Mars’ former large satellite broke into two parts. However, strangely enough, on the map found by Victor, only one satellite was depicted! If it was compiled in those distant times when the red planet had only one moon, then how did the ancient people learn about its existence?
Victor Arutyunyan forwarded the map to the Armenian Academy of Sciences indicating where it had been taken from. Two years later, the war began, he went to the front, where he disappeared without a trace. At this point, the information from Russian historians ended. After the war, no information about the amazing map and the manuscript from which it was taken was published. Perhaps it still lies in the archives of Matenadaran.
Matenadaran
But finding it in our time is quite difficult, because by the time of Matenadaran’s move to the new building in 1959, in addition to many thousands of ancient manuscripts and fragments, there were also hundreds of thousands of other exhibits. Today, more than 17 thousand manuscripts are stored in Matenadaran, in addition, there are other sources, for example, over 100 thousand ancient archival documents. In addition to the manuscripts, there are almost 200 thousand printed antique books from the 16th to 18th centuries. Matenadaran is a unique and unparalleled repository of ancient books in the world, which is located in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan. Unlike, for example, the repository in the Vatican, it is constantly open to researchers and visitors.
Many of the manuscripts lost over the centuries have survived only in Armenian translations, which have become equally valuable to researchers today.
Several years ago, the request from Russian historians was passed on to the staff of Matenadaran. But after searching for several days, they found no mention in their archives of either Victor Arutyunyan or the map he described. They also know nothing about his diary. Perhaps a more extensive search is needed. Or maybe all of this needs to be searched for in Moscow, where he returned later?
This incredible story with the map of Mars might seem like pure fantasy if it weren’t for one important circumstance. Mentions of the satellites of the red planet appeared in European literature several centuries before their discovery. Where could the authors have gleaned this information from? Such mentions in themselves are already indirect, but quite substantial evidence of the existence of some unique and earlier documents containing such information.
Impossible Knowledge
The assumption about the existence of satellites of Mars, namely two, was expressed by Johann Kepler in 1610. Perhaps he was guided by the fact that if Earth has one satellite and Jupiter, as was known at that time, has four, then, consequently, the number of satellites increases in a geometric progression as it gets further from the Sun. According to this logic, Mars should have 2 satellites. However, it turns out that the founder of modern astronomy and the discoverer of its fundamental laws also used some ancient sources. Here’s what the well-known researcher and Armenologist Arthur Armin tells us:
“An interesting fact: we know of Kepler’s 3 planetary laws: the law of ellipses, the law of areas, and the harmonic law. In his major work “The Harmony of the World,” in the 5th volume on page 17, Kepler writes about these 3 laws and states that he should not be credited with these discoveries, and that he does not want to be accused of plagiarism. He admits that he simply read an Egyptian tale about a dragon wrapping around an egg, and the sizes and proportions of the yolk, the white, and the shell are described so accurately that these 3 laws immediately became clear to him. In fact, Kepler says that he only adopted and translated the Egyptian formula.”
The presence of two satellites of Mars more than 150 years before their official discovery was also “accidentally” predicted by Jonathan Swift in 1726. In the third chapter of his famous “Gulliver’s Travels,” the writer describes the flying island of Laputa and says that Laputan astronomers have discovered two satellites of Mars in orbits equal to three and five diameters of the planet itself. By the way, in reality, this is almost twice their actual distance from the center of the planet.
In 1752, the famous French thinker Voltaire in his philosophical tale “Micromegas” also mentions two moons orbiting Mars. He adds that they “elude the eyes of terrestrial astronomers.” But if astronomers do not know about this, then how can a philosopher know? Can all these coincidences be chalked up to chance? However, in addition to these unexplainable insights, there are also specific data that cannot be explained solely by the rich imagination of thinkers from past centuries. And they were found in Georgia, a neighbor of Armenia.
In the Explanatory Dictionary of the famous Georgian scholar, writer, and political figure of the late 17th – early 18th centuries, Saba Orbeliani, there is also a mention of Mars’ satellite and even the radius of its orbit is indicated – 24,019 km. This is quite close to the modern value of Deimos’ orbit – approximately 23,500 km. Where did Orbeliani get such information from? In 1712, he accompanied the Georgian king and his pupil Vakhtang VI to Iran. Their path passed through Armenia. It is quite likely that Saba visited Etchmiadzin and could have seen the ancient manuscript with the map of Mars stored there.
Indeed, if all these historical figures confidently and accurately conveyed such information, then obviously, they must have seen some sources from where they drew all this data.
The Keepers of Knowledge
But how could an ancient Egyptian map of Mars end up in Armenia? At the very beginning of the 4th century, Armenia became the first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion. This happened in 301 AD. Just a century later, in 405, the great Armenian saint and enlightener Mesrop Mashtots, after whom Matenadaran is named, created a new alphabet, which his descendants still use. Under the guidance of Saint Mesrop, a whole school of translators grew up. They started with the Bible, then began to translate the scientific and philosophical treatises of ancient authors. Mashtots sent his best students to study in Egypt, in Alexandria.
There they could visit the famous library, or rather, that part of it that was moved to the Serapis temple, and copy manuscripts. The main building of the library was already destroyed by that time. But the remains of the manuscripts were preserved until the 7th-8th century until they were burned by the Arabs. Many manuscripts were saved and transported to Armenia. Most of them were translated into Old Armenian. We talked about this in more detail in the article “Treasures of the world: how Armenia preserved all the written history of Ancient Egypt and Babylon.”
So, the mention of the ancient Egyptian original on the map found by Viktor Arutyunyan looks plausible and fits well into the general process of preserving and transmitting knowledge from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. But how could such information be obtained in the ancient world?
As strange as it may seem, ancient peoples did not consider all their achievements as their own merit. In all legends, it is said that civilization was brought to humans from the outside – it was given by the gods. Moreover, the ancient Sumerians’ god of wisdom was Ea-Enki, who was associated with the Armenian Highlands. Furthermore, as researchers assert, Armenians still carry the name of this ancient god in their self-designation, obtained from Haik Nahapet.
Who were these mysterious gods of antiquity, and why they gave such information to people is a question that science has yet to answer in the coming decades. Meanwhile, we have the phenomenon of such remarkable knowledge of antiquity, and the written tradition of Armenia, the achievements of which are collected in Matenadaran, undoubtedly played a significant role in their preservation.
by Armen Petrosyan
Translation by Vigen Avetisyan
