In 1818, an American army veteran announced that Earth was hollow, habitable and accessible through enormous openings at the poles. Fifty years later, a British novelist placed an advanced civilisation beneath the surface. Then came Agarttha, hidden masters, Shambhala, polar entrances, Vril and eventually UFO bases. How did the inside of the Earth become so crowded?
Long before Saturn became the internet’s planet of control, black cubes and cosmic imprisonment, it was already associated with a god who ate his children, the slow passage of time, old age, melancholy, lead and the outer boundary of the known heavens. The modern mythology arrived late. Most of its ingredients did not.
The oldest known writing from Mesopotamia does not begin with kings, prayers or epic poetry. It begins with grain, beer, workers, livestock and numbers. Before humans wrote down their stories, someone apparently decided it was important to know where the barley had gone.
Around 3300–3200 BC, administrators in southern Mesopotamia began putting information onto small clay tablets.
Around 3200 BC, something unprecedented had appeared on the plains of southern Mesopotamia: a settlement covering roughly 250 hectares, filled with temples, administrators, craftsmen, labourers and people keeping accounts on clay. As far as archaeology currently shows, Uruk was humanity's first known experiment in life at truly urban scale.
The claim erupted in March 2025 around the Khafre SAR Project, led by Filippo Biondi, Corrado Malanga and Armando Mei. They presented reconstructions they said indicated five structures inside or near the base of Khafre’s pyramid, followed by eight enormous cylindrical shafts extending roughly 648 metres downward, apparently wrapped by spiral structures and connected to deeper geometric features. Online retellings rapidly promoted this into an entire underground city.
