While stories of lost cities abandoned to the jungle are common, actual examples are much less so. Nan Madol, a sprawling stone city on the island of Ponape (formerly Ascension Island) in the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific Ocean, is among the most impressive. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the South Seas. Mostly overgrown with jungle, the ruins of Nan Madol cover 175 acres (71 hectares) on an islet in Ponape’s coral reef.
The city includes temples, tombs, and house platforms, separated by a maze of shallow canals and surrounded by a protective wall originally 30 feet (9 meters) tall. All the surviving structures are made of natural basalt columns stacked crib-style, like the logs in a log cabin, with chinks between “logs” filled with smaller stones, coral, and pebbles. During the years of Nan Madol’s glory, archeologists agree, the stone structures served as foundations for buildings of wood and palm thatch. With no mortar, no tools capable of shaping the hard volcanic stone, and no knowledge of the arch or vault, the builders of Nan Madol nonetheless made a city splendid enough to deserve the title “the Venice of the Pacific.”
According to native Ponapean legends, the city was built by two brothers, Olsihpa and Olsohpa, who came to the island from far away on a large canoe. They became the island’s rulers and set out to build a stone building from which to rule. Their first three attempts were unsatisfactory, but the fourth, Nan Madol, became the island’s capital. When Olsihpa died, Olsohpa became the first Saudeleur or king of Ponape. Fifteen Saudeleurs followed him, but the Ponapeans grew soft and forgot the art of war. In the reign of the sixteenth Saudeleur, the war chief Isokelekel from the island of Kusaie far to the west invaded Ponape, defeated the last Saudeleur and became king in his place. Isokelekel and his successors, the Nahnmwarkis, ruled Nan Madol for a time, but in the reign of the fifth Nahnmwarki, Luhk un Mallada, the city was finally abandoned to the jungle.
There seems no reason to doubt the Ponapean account of Nan Madol’s rise and fall. Radiocarbon dates taken from remains of sacrificial turtles at one of Nan Madol’s temples show that the temple was in use around 1275 CE, which fits the rough chronology established by the traditional list of reigns. The legend of the brothers Olsihpa and Olsohpa might be a folk memory of the arrival of voyagers from Indonesia or the Philippines, where buildings of stone were common long before Nan Madol was built; something as simple as a ship blown off course and wrecked on Ponape’s shores might well have set the entire process in motion.
Nonetheless Nan Madol has been drafted repeatedly into the service of alternative theories of history. Claims that Nan Madol had a population of one million or more, and that it was made millions of years in the past out of 15-ton stone blocks, using engineering principles impossible for modern Ponapeans to duplicate, can be found here and there in the rejected knowledge literature, even though none of these “facts” are true. Believers in the lost continent of Mu, in particular, have redefined Nan Madol repeatedly as a lost Muvian metropolis. See lost continents; Mu; rejected knowledge.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006