Scientists at Bashkir State University have found proof of an ancient, highly developed civilization. A large relief map, made by an unknown technology and found in 1999, shows a region in Russia. Today?s military has similar maps of the same area. The ancient map shows civil engineering works, such as a system of channels and powerful dams. It also contains inscriptions. At first, scientists thought these were written in the Old Chinese language, but they have decided that they were written in hieroglyphics of unknown origin. They haven?t been able to decode the language.

?The more I learn the more I understand that I know nothing,? says Alexandr Chuvyrov, a physicist at Bashkir State University in Russia. Chuvyrov was the one who made the sensational find. In 1995, along with Huan Hun, his post-graduate student from China, Chuvyrov studied a hypothesis about a possible migration of an ancient Chinese population to the areas of Siberia and the Ural in Russia. In an expedition to Bashkiria, they found several rock carvings done in the Old Chinese language. When these were read, they confirmed their hypothesis about Chinese migration in the ancient past. They contained mostly information about economics, as well as marriage and death registrations.

They also found notes written in the 18th century in the archives of the Ufa governor-general that described about 200 unusual stone slabs, situated not far from the village. Chuvyrov and his colleague thought they could be connected with Chinese migrants. The archive notes revealed that in the 17th and 18th centuries, expeditions of Russian scientists to the Ural Region studied 200 white slabs containing signs and patterns. In the early 20th century, archaeologist A. Schmidt also saw some of the white slabs in Bashkiria.

In 1998, Chuvyrov organized a team of his students to search for these stone slabs. He hired a helicopter to fly over the places where he thought they would be. Despite all their efforts, the ancient stones were not found.

Then, during one of Chuvyrov?s trips to the nearby village, the chairman of the local agricultural council, Vladimir Krainov, approached him. The archeologist A. Schmidt had once stayed in his house. He asked, ?Are you searching for some stone slabs? I have a strange slab in my yard.?

?At first, I did not take that report seriously,? Chuvyrov says, ?though I decided to go to the yard to see it. I remember the date exactly: July 21, 1999. Under the porch of the house lay a stab with some dents in it. The slab was so heavy that together, we could not remove it, so I went to the city of Ufa, to ask for help.?

After digging out the slab, the researchers were amazed at its size: it was 5 feet high, 4 feet wide and 6 inches thick and weighed at least a ton. The owner of the house made special wooden rollers so it could be rolled out from the hole. They called it ?Dashka?s stone? in honor of Alexandr Chuvyrov?s granddaughter, who had been born the day before, and transported to the university for research purposes.

After the earth was removed, Chuvyrov says, ?At first sight, I understood that was not a simple stone piece, but a real map, and not a simple map, but a three-dimensional?How did we manage to identify the place? At first, we could not imagine the map was so ancient. Thankfully, the relief of today?s Bashkiria has not changed much for millions of years. We could identify Ufa Height, while Ufa Canyon is our main evidence, because we carried out geological studies and found where it must be according to the ancient map.

?Displacement of the canyon occurred when tectonic plates moved from the east. A group of Russian and Chinese specialists in the field of cartography, physics, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and the Old Chinese language managed to identify that the slab contains a map of Ural region, with the rivers Belya, Ufimka, Sutolka. You can see Ufa Canyon ? the break in the earth?s crust, from the city of Ufa to the city of Sterlitimak. At the moment, Urshak River runs over the former canyon.? The map was created on a scale of 1:1.1 kilometers.

It has been established that the slab consists of three layers. The bottom layer is 5 inches thick and made of the hardest dolomite. The second level was made out of diopside glass. The technology of how to make this is unknown to modern science. The image was created on this layer. The third layer protects the image and is made of calcium porcelain, about ? of an inch thick. ?It should be noted,? Chuvyrov says, ?that the relief has not been manually made by an ancient stonecutter. It is simply impossible. It is obvious that the stone was machined.? X-ray photographs confirm that the slab was manmade with precision tools.

At first the scientists thought the map was made by the ancient Chinese, because of the vertical inscriptions on it. Vertical writing was used in Old Chinese before the 3rd century. To check this, professor Chuvyrov visited the main library in China, where he looked through several rare books. None of them contained writing similar to the inscriptions on the slab. After meeting with colleagues from Hunan university, he concluded that the type of porcelain covering the stab had never been used in China. They were not able to decipher the inscriptions. However, Chuvyrov believes he has deciphered one word on the map: the one that identifies the latitude of today?s city of Ufa.

The longer the slab was studied, the more mysterious it seemed. A giant irrigation system was laid out on it. In addition to rivers, the map shows two wide channels and 12 dams. As a physicist, Alexandr Chuvyrov thinks that at the moment mankind is only able to build a small part of what is pictured on the map.

It was difficult to determine even an approximate age for the slab. Radiocarbon analysis was carried out, and the different layers were scanned using a uranium chronometer. These tests gave different results, so the age of the image remained unclear. Then 2 shells were found embedded in the surface. One of them turned out to be about 500 million years old and the second one is about 120 million years old.

?The map was probably created at the time when the Earth?s magnetic pole was situated in the today?s Franz Josef Land, which was exactly 120 million years ago,? Chuvyrov says. ?The map we have goes beyond the traditional view of mankind and we need a long time to get used to it?At first we thought that the stone was about 3,000 years old?until we identified the shells ingrained in the stone. But who can guarantee that the shells were alive when they were ingrained in the map? The map?s creator may have used petrified shells.? This would explain the older shell, that dates to 500 million years ago.

Materials from the Bashkir find have already been investigated by the Center of Historical Cartography in Wisconsin. According to them, a three-dimensional map such as this one would have been used as a navigational tool and could only have been created from an aerial survey. This type of detailed work is hard to do, even with today?s equipment. ?Try to map at least a mountain!? Chuvyrov says. ?The technology of compiling such maps demands supercomputers and a survey from the space shuttle.?

There are no roads shown on the map, so the civilization of that time may have used only air transportation or water ways. Or the creators of the ancient map may not have lived in the region at all, and were only interested in draining the land to prepare it for future settlement.

Scientists now believe the map may be only a fragment of a map of the entire Earth. If this is true, there could be 348 more pieces of it yet to be discovered. The other fragments would be probably somewhere near the site where the first slab was found. In the outskirts of Chandar, scientists took over 400 samples of soil and found out that the map had originally been situated in the gorge of Sokolinaya Mountain (Falcon Mountain). During the glacial age, the large map was probably torn to pieces. But if scientists ever manage to gather all the pieces together, the map should be approximately 400 yards square in size.

Chuvyrov believes he knows where four more pieces can be found. One could lie under one house in Chandar, the other, under the house of merchant Khasanov, the third under one of the village baths, and the fourth could be under the bridge of the local railway.

So who created this map? Chuvyrov is cautious about that. ?I do not like to talk about UFOs or extraterrestrials. Let us call the author of the map simply ?the creator.??

Learn the truth about ancient civilizations on the earth by reading ?From the Ashes of Angels? and ?Gods of Eden? by Andrew Collins, click here.

To see more photos of the ancient map,click here.

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