Magnetic Tumulus

The first text is called "VRATNICE - Predvorje i kult mrtvih vladara Bosanske doline piramida (bs)" or "VRATNICE - The Court and Cult of the Dead Rulers, Bosnian Valley of Pyramids (en)" [1]. After a foreword celebrating the "uncanny planetary vision" of his son Semir Osmanagic, Muris Osmanagic explains the reasons of the Foundation interest for the site of Vratnica, a village located a few kilometers from Visoko where excavations have begun (without a proper authorization at the beginning) in August 2006. Near this village is the hill of Toprakalia, of which Muris Osmanagic says that it has a "strange, non-Slavic name" - I’m not really sure of this, but it seems to me that this name, with a Turkish consonance, is not very surprising for a region that stayed under Othoman domination for four centuries... This hill could be, according to Mr. Osmanagic Senior, a hypothetical "tumulus", at the same time "burial place of a pre-historic ruler of the Bosnian Valley of Pyramids", and a "place of a powerful magnetic pole".

What are the indications given by Mr. Osmanagic in favour of this hypothesis? First, the presence of great stone slabs, of which he says at the same time that they are made of "fine-grained sandstone, very hard", and that they are "having the appearance of poured concrete", which is quite contradictory. These slabs are in addition decorated with a "very smooth mosaic with hollowed out areas". In fact, the Vratnica hill is most probably made of the same layers from Middle Miocene as the Pljesevica one, layers of sandstone bearing "ripple-marks" alternating with layers of marl and clay. The other indication, really convincing according to Mr. Osmanagic Senior, is the fact that the compass "do not react" at the top of the hill, where a "strong magnetic force prevented it from functioning". What is the link between these two elements and the "Court" of ancient Rulers, or the "Cult of the Dead Rulers"? We will have no answer about it, but the author promises, for the end of 2006, "evidence of the true archeological potential of the Toprakalia Hill" - evidence that is still waited for at the time when I write, at the end of January 2007.

Megaliths in a tunnel

The second text, "OTKRIĆE MEGALIT KAMENE PLOČE T-1 (bs)" or "DISCOVERY OF THE T-1 MEGALITH (en)" [1], leaves Vratnica for the tunnel of Ravne, about 3 kilometers from Visocica. The first remarkable element is the author’s insistence in calling the rock in which the tunnel is carved "marine breccia" ("marinska brecia"). To speak of "breccia" is quite disputable, as the geologists prefer to use the word "conglomerate" when the clasts are mostly rounded, as is clearly the case here; but the most disputable is the word "marine", to qualify a rock of which the author thinks, as will be seen, that it is about 15 thousand years old... Now, the Visoko region has not been covered by the sea for more than 20 million years, and the rocks surrounding the tunnel have been identified by geologists as part of the Lasva series, conglomerates deposited in fresh water in an intra-mountain lake at the end of the Miocene, about 10 million years ago (see the complete article on the geology of Visoko region).

Muris Osmanagic then tells the discovery, inside this "marine breccia", of two "monoliths", called T1 and T2: they are two sandstone slabs, more than two meters long, and several tens of centimeters thick. The first megalith, T1, is described as bearing groups of "mysterious symbols", immediately identified by the author as "parts of some old system of writing". These symbols are said to be several tens (about 50 according to the following text, see below); now it is interesting to note that only one drawing by the author shows the entire "monolith" and the symbols that "cover" it; but the few photographs inside the text (of which one is totally blurred) show only details, and allow the reader to identify at the most 4 different symbols. No other photograph of any other symbol has been published on the Foundation website, nor anywhere on the Web. I can admit that it is quite difficult to shoot good photographs at the bottom of a narrow tunnel, but it is however surprising that the claim for such an extraordinary discovery (in the following text the author says he considers this "script" as older than all the previously known scripts) is not supported by undeniable photographs of these 50 symbols... On the other hand, Ms. Colette Dowell, who had the opportunity, during her stay in Visoko with Robert Schoch, to visit this Ravne tunnel, seems to consider that between what she saw and the photographs published by the Foundation there are some unexplainable differences (see the entire text (en)).

Muris Osmanagic concludes his text with a try at dating the megaliths, and there it becomes quite funny. Let’s follow his reasoning:
– the megalith is larger than the tunnel, so it could not have been brought inside it, and had to be made on the spot;
– the megalith is under a thick layer of "marine breccia", so it is older than the breccia and has been made before it was deposited;
– the tunnel is dig in the "marine breccia", so that it has been built after it was deposited.

So we have, in chronological order: 1) the manufacturing of the "monolith"; 2) the depositing (in the sea) of the "breccia" above the monolith; 3) the digging of the tunnel in the "breccia" after the withdrawal of the sea.

The logic is perfect, there is still the necessity to date the depositing of this "breccia": as even Mr. Osmanagic must have difficulties to imagine an advanced civilization living 20 million years, or even 10 million years ago (the actual age of the "breccia"), he has to decide for a much more recent date for these rocks, a date preferably compatible with his son’s previous "hypothesis" about the "valley of the pyramids". The solution is simple: this catastrophic flood ("the greatest ecological catastrophe in the history of mankind") responsible for the depositing of the "breccia" can only be connected with the end of the last ice age, when happened the "rapid melting of the last thick cover of ice in the rest of Europe, which had been as much as 3.5 to 4.0 km thick."

There we have again - but more surprising in a Mining Engineer and former Minister for Mines and Energy - the same abyssal ignorance as in Goran Cakic of what a post-glacial transgression is, and of the way the end of the last ice age took place in Europe. Let’s only mention again that the flandrian transgression (en) is quite well known along the European coasts, and that it has not been more than 100 to 130 meters, so that a deposit of "marine breccia" in Ravne more than 400 meters high during this transgression is excluded... Another possible explanation of the presence of these megaliths in tunnels too narrow for their transport, an explanation that do not imply to ignore or contradict the local geology, is to suppose that these sandstone blocks are naturally included in the Miocene conglomerate simply because they were present at the bottom of the Zenica-Sarajevo lake when the conglomerate was deposited. If they are really made of Middle Miocene sandstone, this sandstone is older by several million years than the conglomerate, and that would have left the time, during partial emersions of part of the lake bottom, for the erosion of a more exposed layer. Concerning the "symbols", if there is no doubt that a human hand has traced them, absolutely nothing, for the present, can allow a guess on their age.

The most ancient alphabet in the world?

After the discovery and the "datation" of the mysterious symbols, they still have to be analyzed: that is what Muris Osmanagic claims to do in his third work, "POREDJENJE SIMBOLA I ZNAKOVA (bs)" or "COMPARISON OF SYMBOLS AND SIGNS (en)" [1],
with the subtitle "Pre-historic “Proto-Bosnian” script, Western European rhunic and the ancient Phoenician alphabet". As the title indicates, it is a comparison between the "alphabet" of 50 symbols (for most of which, again, no photograph has been published) and alphabets from various places and times, here the Phoenician alphabet (en), the Greek alphabet (en) and the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon runes (en). Not being myself an epigraphist, I have no opinion about the scientific validity of Mr. Osmanagic’s analysis, I will just make a few layman comments.

Let’s pass over the introduction, which dwells again on the great age of the symbols (more than 10 000 years according to the author) and on the episod of cataclysmic flood at the end of the ice age; the first argument given by the author in favour of his theory that these symbols actually form an "alphabet", is the fact that "all ten of the first Phoenician numbers can be derived from the list of “Proto-Bosnian” symbols". Now these "ten of the first Phoenician numbers" are in fact simple vertical marks; on this account, any graffiti on a stone could be called an alphabet! Muris Osmanagic goes on with his demonstration, identifying two similar letters in the Phoenician and "Proto-Bosnian" alphabets, the "X" and the "Y". What he evidently implies is that the "Proto-Bosnian" must be considered as the ancestor of the Phoenician.

Mr. Osmanagic is then astonished by the lack, in the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, of the symbol shaped like an arrow found in some "special areas" of the T1 megalith (why is this particular lack surprising, and not the lack of numerous other symbols that are also absent in the Greek and Phoenician alphabets? and why are certain areas on the megalith "special"? that’s a mystery!). But, fortunately, there actually is an arrow in the runic alphabet - as well as, what a surprise, on all the geographic maps where this symbol shows the direction of the North!!! On the other hand, the runic alphabet do not have a "Y", which is present in the Greek and Phoenician alphabets: for Muris Osmanagic, this is not by chance [2].

Mr. Osmanagic’s conclusion, based on the presence or absence of these two symbols (the arrow and the "Y"), is that the Ravne monolith is the missing piece that will help to resolve the "puzzle" of the alphabets origin: as the "Proto-Bosnian" is the only one to have at the same time the "Y" and the arrow, it means that it is the ancestor of both the runic and the Phoenician alphabets, thus of all the European alphabets "from the North Sea to the Mediterranean". And this is the evidence of a "great, as yet unknown, planetary force and sea-faring empire, centered in the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids"... I, for myself, think that it is a pity that Mr. Osmanagic Senior has not extended his "analysis" to some non-European alphabets, as he could surely have found some other "historically significant" coincidences; it would indeed be unthinkable that such a "planetary empire" had not left traces in the Indonesian batak as well as in the Indian devanagari...

The fore-father of all amphitheaters

The last text by Muris Osmanagic is, in my opinion, the most extraordinary of this series. Called "TAJNE PRAHISTORIJSKOG RELJEFA (bs)"
or "SECRETS OF THE PRE-HISTORIC RELIEF (en)" [1], it will allow us to discover the extraordinary secrets of the "T2 megalith", found a few tens of meters from the T1. Different from the first one, this megalith does not have a flat and smooth surface, but looks like, according to the author, a "miniature model of some terrain" with its "hills, valleys, mountains, and rivers":

The fundamental question, according to the author, is to know wether it is really a relief map, and of which territory. As Mr. Osmanagic is a tenant of the scientific method, he begins by eliminating the possibility of a natural origin: it is impossible, he says, that this relief could have been "shaped by the underground pressure of many layers on top of it which could have impressed various parts of larger stones into the smooth sandstone surface". Frankly, I do not think that any real geologist could have emitted such a ridiculous hypothesis [3]. So, the "natural hypothesis" being discarded, that relief is inevitably the result of a voluntary human intervention.

Then remains the problem of the identification of the territory represented on this "map"; no need for a laboured demonstration: all that the author has to do is to show the megalith photograph along with a Google Earth picture and a couple of sketches, and that is enough to conclude that this "prehistoric map" shows the "valley of the Pyramids":

As the author himself admits, "it seems to border upon science fiction"... Indeed, to use some very vague similitudes between a few details on a stone and a Google Earth image as sufficient basis to construct, as then does Muris Osmanagic, an entire theory about an extraordinary civilization, appears to me to border more upon - bad - science fiction than upon the scientific method.

Upon this frail basis, Mr. Osmanagic thus builds up some hypothesis on this civilization technology, a technology that is supposed to have allowed the "casting" of a tri-dimensional map of its territory in the form of an artificial sandstone block - this hypothesis is, according to him, confirmed by the famous "ghost" report by the Civil Engineering Institute from Tuzla (see particularly here->40] the paragraph about the fantasy use of this inexistant report by Semir Osmanagic concerning the Visocica conglomerate). Some hypothesis as well about the significance of the "valley of the Pyramids": for Mr. Osmanagic Senior, this valley "was not an ordinary city with a few pyramids", but rather "a real metropolis of the first Pan-European Empire from Ireland to Egypt, which in its extent exceeded that of the many thousands of years later ancient Empire of Rome"...

What did this "metropolis" contain, beside the "pyramids"? The author identifies a linear structure, that can be seen on the Google image as well as on the "relief map"; now, the linear structure on the today satellite image being a road, he has to deduce that this road inevitably already existed during Prehistory, and that is an additional evidence, if needed, of the importance of this "metropolis" located at the center of an "infrastructure of roads built in pre-historic times in the valley of the River Bosna".

The other interesting "structure" identified by the author, on the Google image as well as on the sandstone block, is this concave shape:

that the author connects with the hill with the red arrow on the aerial photograph:

According to him, this hill, whose shape "in no way appears to be a natural hill", is a gigantic "amphitheater", the "fore-father of all amphitheaters" as Visocica is the "mother of all pyramids", an amphitheater that could have been used also as a quarry for the construction material for all the "valley of the Pyramids" [4]. It is however evident that Mr. Osmanagic Senior has never intently observed the shape of a river slopes in a meander (en) in a hilly region, or he would maybe have noticed that the outside (or concave) edge of a meander can easily present the same aspect as his "amphitheater"; here is for instance the La Queuille meander in France (Auvergne) :

The characteristic shape of Krstac is most probably the result of an ancient Fojnicka meander:

But, according to the author, the ultimate proof is still to come; he announces that "there exists a fourth indication, and this one is mythological, that the relief-map on the T-2 megalith represents a territory which was under the protection of a supernatural deity from another world"... This fourth indication was announced, in September 2006, for a next article soon to come, and I must admit that I am in despair that this fifth text is not yet published, as it will surely perfect Muris Osmanagic’s grand work.