A photo from open sources
Despite the fact that one miserable day is the greatest The Alexandria Library of the Ancient World burned down, its priceless manuscripts were not all gone. Keepers of this unique the treasuries of human knowledge perfectly understood what awaited library at that turbulent time, and therefore copied the most valuable manuscripts, replacing them with originals, and those safely sent to other countries. They say that part of them settled in repositories of Tibetan monasteries, in the Vatican library and many other places.
One of the centers of storage of these invaluable documents of antiquity became the residence of the Armenian Church of Etchmiadzin. Further in Armenia formed a special center for the storage of ancient manuscripts – Matenadaran, which became the national treasure of the USSR in the 20th century.
In 1939, the authorities of Soviet Armenia transported ancient scrolls from the residence of the catholicos to Yerevan. Among the participants of this company the young historian Viktor Harutyunyan was also listed (in reality, he was an employee of the NKVD from Moscow). Victor kept a diary, which allowed researchers later come across a very interesting fact.
A photo from open sources
Victor wrote in his diary that on one of the ancient scrolls he saw a map of Mars, on which a satellite was also marked Red planet. It so struck an educated young a man that he boyishly took this card and took it with him, in order to study it thoroughly, because I could not understand how ancient times, people could make a map of Mars, and even with a satellite. The fact is that the satellites of Mars were discovered only in 1877, before that, a sufficiently powerful telescope did not exist on Earth, to see these minor cosmic bodies on such vast distance from the earth. And on the ancient map, which practically an employee of the NKVD stole from the archive, the satellite was designated. How could this happen? ..
How the ancients knew about the satellites of Mars remains a mystery
The boyish trick of a young historian gave him little if judge by disappointed entries in Harutyunyan’s diary. At first, the text was in Latin, and secondly, this separate sheet is not He gave the main information – who and when made the map of Mars.
Victor sent a map to the Academy of Sciences of Armenia stating where is she from, and at that time he went to the front (the Great Patriotic War), where he went missing. More about him and about that ill-fated map of Mars – no information to researchers could not be found. Most likely, this scroll still lies in Matenadaran Archive in Yerevan.
A photo from open sources
Indirect evidence of the existence of the map of Mars
Indirect evidence of what could be (what about Mars and his companions were known in ancient times) is the Explanatory Dictionary Georgian scientist Saba Orbeliani (1658-1725), in which you can find a reference to the satellite of Mars with a radius of orbit in 24019 kilometers (the current value of the radius of the orbit for the satellite Deimos – 25,459 kilometers). It is possible that Orbeliani could in his time to visit Etchmiadzin, where he got information about Mars from the manuscript stored there, a separate map of which Viktor saw Harutyunyan.
In conclusion, I want to note that if you set the task to search for that ancient map of Mars, then today it will not be done so simple: in the funds of Matenadaran there are more than 200 thousand various old documents. This is if you do not take into account all kinds of obstacles to be expected by the Armenian authorities, as well as other unforeseen difficulties, which will certainly arise before by any researcher …
Mars time
