You guys know what I read as the pressure climbs, right? Yep, yep, Jane Austen fanfic. But what happens if the pressure climbs above that and I’m running on empty?
If you said “books about great lost civilizations” you get a prize. I’m not sure what the prize is, but it’s probably a booby prize. Anyway, so in the five days between two drives across the country, I fell into a series of “I totally know where Atlantis is” books.
And I ran into it. Head first.
Noble savages. The whole genre is full of noble savages and their ancient ways of knowing. They’re soft pedaling it on the great goddess these days, possibly because the sound of raucous laughter has made them back off. But oh, the noble savages, and the evil Western civ.
Here let me interject that for just a moment that it’s understandable that all the “ancient lost civilization” people are new agers and often sound like they inhaled a bit too deeply from the peace pipe. Because counter-cultural people — truly counter-cultural — aren’t usually the sanest or most respectable people around. Mostly because if they were they would walk the line, trying to keep their jobs, pensions and benes.
Oh, and don’t sing me your sacrosanct science of archeology song. I still think mostly they’re looking under the street lights, and even so I’ve seen them revise their “certainties” over and over again till what was “science” when I was young is now “we used to think.” The problem with archeology is that it’s just soft enough that a few dominant personalities with a theory can stop new discoveries. Or if you prefer, science changes a grave at a time, and none more than archeology. You people in STEM, even if you dive into their writings, probably don’t catch the whiff of “Stompy Stomp because I said so” that I do, because of having been forced — for my sins — to study literature so they’d let me study languages. But trust me, it’s obvious to me. And impossible to ignore. Like a stompy stompy skunk just got run over.
While on that, and as a side bar, are there ancient lost civilizations? Oh, almost for sure. Humans create civilizations as they breathe. And advances are often lost to cataclysms or self-goal even now.
Was any of these civilizations at our level? No. Or at least highly unlikely, because well… a lot of things had to hit just right to get us where we are when we are. 19th century or even 18th century level? Don’t know. It’s possible. But…. no trace? Well, none we’ve found. Remember however that if it was before the ice age, it could have happened and left no trace. That kind of change scours the landscape. Now Egypt or Babylon level? 99% sure there are some we haven’t unearthed. You see, those tend to be…. smallish in scope, and therefore easier to completely destroy. Trade goods found elsewhere would not be easily found. or if found, they wouldn’t necessarily be obvious. Or classed as “anomalies”.
But that’s not the point. The point is that everyone accepts that lost civilizations don’t exist, and so anyone bucking the “everyone knows” is likely to be slightly peculiar anyway.
Still must it always be noble savages? In the name of the gods of sanity why?
I read well-intentioned descriptions of children burials and how sad the kids’ parents must be, while … well, let’s say I’ve read enough about pre-history to know what a child sacrifice looks like. And the fact this author is incapable of “seeing” it is scary and infuriating. Actually the fact that all of them all the time ignore signs of sacrifice, cannibalism, tribal war, etc.
And it’s like that with everything. Absolutely everything. “Western Civilization evil/bad” and “If only we listened to the wisdom of the noble savages.”
The problem is the noble savages are a myth. And possibly the most harmful myth of all, ammunition for oikophobes and haters of civilization and the west. It also encourages the soft-headed and young to think that if they destroy civilization they’ll get paradise. These born-again Rosseaunians have been plaguing everything that still works and thinking life will improve if they destroy it. Then taking the increased problems as a sign that we need to destroy more. And I’m tired of it.
For the record no ancient civilization other than Israel (and there’s a troubling passage in the Bible about whatshisname promising to sacrifice the first person to come greet him out of his house, and his daughter does. Yes, there are other explanations, and maybe it was just shutting her up in a nunnery or something, which is still weird, but not as much) is free of human sacrifice. We now know even Greece and Rome sacrificed young people when under pressure, duress and fear. I’m not sure how widespread cannibalism is, but it still happens in current day, so why shouldn’t it happen when there was no strong moral repulsion of it? It gallops through African fairytales and legends, for instance. Other things? Well, let me disabuse you: no, it wasn’t white people who brought rape and female exploitation to the Americas. You might not find any references to it in old legends for the same reason you don’t find us stopping to say “Oh, by the way we breathe air.” Also rape and female oppression wasn’t a crime. It was “the way things are.” Pretty much for everyone till those Judeo-Christian weirdos decided that women too were children of G-d and ought to be respected as such. Which threw a spanner in the works right and proper. And even so, because men’s physical strength is and has always been (no matter what lies the moderns tell) immensely larger than women’s, it took centuries — centuries — and technological advances (G-d bless Smith and Wesson) for the idea that raping women or pushing them around was a bad thing to fully percolate through society in the West. Yes, yes, the anglosphere was better, particularly the colonies, but I still grew up with “He beats me but he’s my man” and my family being weird because the women would straight up shiv you if you disrespected them.
Primitives, living close to the land? Oh, please. The only reason that raping a woman was wrong was because it somehow injured the man she belonged to. That’s it. Which is why even in Regency England (or in the Portugal of my childhood) the remedy for rape was to marry the woman to her rapist.
So, great civilization of the past better than the West? Sorry not buying it. Particularly when you’re carefully avoiding seeing the signs of horror and evil.
Someone whose mind and “sense” I greatly respect said he sensed evil all around Gobekli Tepe, which checks with Peter Grant saying that the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are viewed by locals as terrible places where terrible stuff happened. I know how I react to eve pictures of Aztec pyramids. Is it because I know what happened there? Sure. Probably. Maybe. And?
Civilizations can be the best of their time, and technically accomplished and still be rank and utter horrors.
A lot of people, even the right, look for perfection in the past. It won’t fadge. No the Victorians weren’t better than us. The eighteenth century wasn’t better than us. And no, the early twentieth century wasn’t more “moral” than us. Oh, sure, the ethos, the in your face public displays were. And they hadn’t (yet) been invaded by an oikophobic and destructive elite who tried to make a mockery and a destruction of everything good and moral.
But the real people, the people living day to day were about the same. The US remains the most religious place on Earth and, look you, Christendom remains Christendom. Yes, people will say they’re agnostic or atheists in polls a lot more because in the past it was frowned upon and no it’s lionized. But what they feel and think, at base level hasn’t changed a whole heck of a lot. We still have our fair share of saints, even if low key and not talking about it. And they had their high share of scoundrels, perverts and evil people, same as we do. It’s just in the past they used to hide.
(Yeah, yeah, church attendance is down. Have you looked at the mainstream churches recently? Because I have to make a constant effort to find the one of my denomination that’s not insane at that moment, and sometimes this means driving two hours to service. If it weren’t because I feel I need it I wouldn’t bother, either.)
The kids, whatever the media tells you, are still all right.
There is no perfection in the past. The savages were by and large less noble than we are. And our recent ancestors too. Which doesn’t justify erasing the memory of their great deeds, btw. But it also doesn’t justify treating ourselves as if we can’t achieve greatness.
There is no perfection in the future either. Only fools, children and leftists (BIRM) believe that. Don’t aim for perfection. Or do, but know you won’t achieve it.
If anything requires that “everyone” does something to achieve it, it’s not achievable. If you think any society is a failure because there’s the occasional rape or murder, or because your neighbor is a rough-talking heathen, you’re just going to enshrine barbarism.
Instead improve what you can. Do the best you can.
Oh, and do study the past and learn from it, both the good and the bad, without trying to worship your ancestors. That was always a crazy heresy.
And please, please, please, get some sane archeologists in the game. (Which might require taking it from academia.)
Now I’m going to return to writing my fascinating and not wholly noble savages. Catch you later.
According To Hoyt 
Wait, we’re talking falls of civilizations? Allow ’em to contribute:
This is a really cool video/podcaste series: https://youtube.com/@fallofcivilizations?si=q6H0z0C8YmHt8yX6
The fall of the Songhai Empire was kind of depressing. Though Easter Island for it far worse, but that was mostly by accident not raw industrial grade stupidity the way the Songhai did themselves in.
Ohhh there’s a new one out I haven’t seen yet.
Back when I was working a slow 3rd-shift security job I managed to watch all the previous episodes for an hour or two a night.
If this is the guy I think he is, the information seems good but his delivery drives me right up the wall. Every time I hear him portentiously intone, “The Sum-MAR-i-ans,” I start growling.
A few years ago, I listened to a modern Navajo talking about the “Four Corners region of the US” as the land that the “Great Spirit” gave to them.
Of course, he didn’t mention the Indian Tribes that lived there before his people entered that territory.
Those tribes still have stories about what happened when the Navajo arrived there.
“Noble Savages”?
Just called them Savages, just like other humans in the “rough”.
Right.
And there are all sorts of conflicts and bloody territorial wars between tribes that went on for centuries before the white men appeared … which the various tribes now would just prefer to handwavium away. Because, dontchaknow, it was all peace and one with the land and all that indigenous way of knowing…
There’s evidence of cannibalism at one particular site in the SW – yep, human protein preserved in coprolites left in the ruins of a small Puebloan village. Attackers massacred the original inhabitants, butchered and ate them … and then crapped in the hearth.
For some reason, the peaceful at-one-with-nature modern-day Indians don’t want to know much about that…
I think one attempt to “explain” that away was to claim that it wasn’t “SW Indians” that did it, but were Aztecs who did that. 😆
OrmaybetheindianssoldthesurvivorstotheAztecs?
SomethinggoingonwithWPsuddenly.Icanusespacesnormallywithanyotherapporprogram…sorry
The woke archaeologists keep claiming that the Anasazi weren’t cannibals, and the tribes in the area keep claiming that they were.
That said, there were tribes in the Southwest that had cannibalism happen in historical times, and I think we had this discussion before.
Native Americans are still fighting, just not as viciously. A few years ago I read an article about some Navajo who erased some petroglyphs or something that were sacred to the Hopi to erase claims on “their”. And ironically a lot of the whole “we Natives are all in this together” idea came out of different tribes’ kids being sent to the much-reviled Indian Boarding Schools.
*”their land”
I see that periodically in local news. In the lateish 1800s, the region held Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin tribes (as best as I can tell, not many of the last. They’re more related to the Snake tribes in NE Oregon). Somebody in the US government decided to do a reservation combining all three tribes. The Modoc objected, and the Modoc War was a result.
Like a certain war Our Gracious Hostess prefers we do not discuss, the war ain’t entirely over, though the venue is frequently in courthouses. Not that the Klamath–currently on top in the power pyramid–aren’t willing to do lawfare against the white “settlers”. Oregon water law is perfect for that purpose, though when they tried to shut down the supply for a small town east of us, the courts said “Hell No”. However, the local river valley used to have a lot of cattle ranches. Not any more. Senior water rights (“from time immemorial for the Tribes”) and a slew of litigation did that.
As a side note, I’ve only met one person who actually liked the fish that the whole river thing was supposed to protect. Another says even his cats run away from it.
Addendum: what was explained to me about the old testament guy who sacrificed his daughter was there were guidelines for how to repent from an oath you should not have made in the earlier parts of the Old Testament, but he either didn’t know about them or none of the priest class told him about them, so he actually followed through and did it. And that is the last time his line is ever mentioned at all.
Basically he made a boastful and foolish oath, had an opportunity to repent of it, and did not. And was probably, condemned for it, or at least had to directly account before God for it.
In that context, it’s one of the more chilling stories, and a reminder that even if you think you are doing the right thing by following the rules you think you know, you can still be doing something horrible because people are not infallible.
We need humility, even in our convictions.
And also a reminder to NOT SWEAR OATHS without thinking very long and very carefully about what you’re promising to do. And most importantly, all of the ways that it can go wrong through no fault of your own.
Which is why I sworn exactly two oaths in my life. My commissioning Oath and my marriage vows.
I had to dig into this. It is Jephtheh and his daughter. Until the early 19th century everyone knew that he had to sacrifice his daughter on the alter and burn her body as a gift to Jehovah.
It was 19th century americans during the revival who either revived or invented the idea that she was in religious isolation forever.
God had already forbidden the need for human sacrifice with saving Isaacs son with the ram. This story is the last given instance of human sacrifice in Judaism.
So make of it what you will.
https://www.thetorah.com/article/did-jephthah-actually-kill-his-daughter
Also, to correct the record: you said he vowed to sacrifice the first person to come out and greet him, but he the actual wording of his vow was that he would sacrifice the first creature to come out and greet him: he was expecting it to be his dog or something. Still a vow he should have repented of, but not one that was obviously wrong ahead of time. The way you worded it, it would have been a vow that was obviously wrong ahead of time.
True. Though a dog wasn t a licit sacrifice either, so….
While not blatantly wrong beforehand, it was still a foolish one given the possibility that something unexpected might happen (and actually did happen). Also begs the question of whether the Lord would want a burnt offering dog anyway, given that canines never appear in the list of ritual offerings. A smarter (albeit still reckless) oath would have been to consecrate whatever came through the door first, in a similar fashion to what Hannah did with Samuel. An appropriate sacrificial animal could have still been sacrificed, while a different animal (or a person…) could have been sent to the Tabernacle to serve as the priests thought best.
apparently consecrate to the Lord AND burn could be consecrate to the Lord OR burn. The particle can mean either. Which…..
As for my saying “person” apparently the pronoun used is for humans, so…. Look, the man was either tripping or the recorders are as confused as the rest of us.
Well, he was fighting these guys, so he needed all the help he could get:
LOL
You are completely right that already the story of Isaac shows that Abraham’s G-d was ix-nay on human sacrifice from the start. But the Torah has to keep saying ‘Don’t give your children to Moloch! How many times do I have to tell you!’ from the time of Moses right through Jeremiah. I think that shows it was a recurring problem in the region; you don’t make laws against things no one is doing anyway. Grim thoughts!
We know it continued to be a problem in the region. At one point, the Hebrew armies (both Israel and Judah, iirc) gathered against one of the neighboring kings (Moab, I think). And in desperation, the defending King offered his own son to Moloch.
Yup, that’s in Second Kings 3, and it is a weird episode.
So railing against it makes sense, because you tend to pick up your neighbors’ vices, honestly.
Whivh is one of the reasons why the Lord created a framework that emphasized how different the Israelites were than everyone else. It isolated them somewhat from their neighbors. And while outsiders could become part of the Israelite nation, it was a multi-generational process. The newcomers weren’t Israelites until enough generations had passed that the values and beliefs had become ingrained into them.
The young men weren’t to go casually picking wives from outside of the Tribes. The rising generation would have proper Hebrew parents who lived the law (or failing that, one parent who was willing to live as a half-citizen for the rest of his or her life).
Yes, but to sacrifice his daughter he had to enlist the High Priest, and then people would have rebelled. Seriously.
Hi all, long time no post, I know.
I’m going to be deleting this account at midnight Pacific, because my ex has been screen-shotting my posts to use against me in court proceedings. I’ll be back under a different pseudonym and avatar with a burner email.
Okay.
<blockquote>There is no perfection in the past.</blockquote>
Well, see, here’s where we differ… There were moments of perfection in the mid-’70s… If you had seen Denise in her white bikini, Deborah in a modest dress, Kelly in her McDonald’s uniform — or any of a number of other young women I was too socially inept to ask out properly…
Oh. Wait. You weren’t talking about that kinda thing.
Sorry! Never mind!
Some things, in a few places, for a short time, are “perfect.” At least in the eyes of some beholders.
Wait, so what if someone writes Jane Austin lost world fanfic?
Austen, d*mn it. (Yes, I know this is the Queen of Typos speaking, but that ONE bothers me.) And do it. I dare you.
…hmm. According to wkpedia, “The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons.” That could have potential right there…/starts thinking
Okay, that’s not what I mean. LOL.
The fanfic is about her NOVELS. Like, Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice discovers a lost civilization. Sigh. Don’t make me write it.
Ruins and Ruination. I can see it.
“Ruins and Ruination”? Dooooo eeeeeet… The power of my mind compels thee! 🙂
I’d read it; I already have one of your Austen fanfics.
Stephanie Barron did a great job with those years, and even overlapped onto the Known Years with her series of mysteries. (I have the complete set, having discovered one volume in a Free Book Exchange locally.)
Yes. I liked that series.
Jane Austin was a distant cousin lost in a cave in Central Texas while being chased by bootleggers.
“…a novelist barely alive…we can reconstruct her…”
This one.
Dr. Jane Austin is Steve Austin’s younger, smarter sister, somehow shamefully unmentioned in either the book or the TV series; which already by itself gives us an open road to “Jane Austin fanfic” that can’t, hardly, be any worse than some of those later TV episodes.
sample: story/episode 1, “Jane Austin and the stargate to Epsilon Edidani.”
Did this cousin have an out of body experience and end up on Mars? 😋
Gor
A Dancing Slave Girl? 😆
https://richardhartersworld.com/gorrette/
Or Jane Austin in Space! Which is actually a thing, in a way.
The Saint’s Row video game franchise is like GTA, but with lots of satire, humor, and over the top stuff as the series went on. For example, second game has segments in which you drive a septic truck through the city, and spray targeted buildings.
The fourth game has you fighting back against an alien invader who likes to collect humans who catch his attention, and place those humans in stasis. The events of the game are periodically narrated by an unseen woman with a proper British accent.
At the end of the game, after the big bad alien has been defeated, you learn the identity of the faceless narrator. Apparently the big bad was very long-lived, and a fan of Jane Austen…
When I saw the title I wondered why you were writing about US Navy Submarine crews. 😉
Nah. by and large I like my submariner fans. 😀
Bubbleheads are very level-headed.
Submariner was kinda cool, but I prefer Captain America.
Silly
Submariner? You mean Namor of Atlantis? He was a jerk. Hated surface dwellers, but couldn’t stop slobbering over that news woman. From the 60s/70s cartoon?
Winnah Winnah!
The tunes from those Marvel 60s cartoons are tattooed on my brain.
.
I was a skinny geek, with a bunch of time on crutches in middle and high school, ….. that enlisted Infantry. Did that Cap cartoon influence me? Heh. My sister (RIP), having seen the Captain America movie, decided “Yup. That’s my brother.” (Miss ya, sis.)
Well, I am about 110 pounds heavier and four inches taller than my high school self…
Yeah, those are the ones. Had Thor, Iron Man, and Hulk. Never liked Spock of Atlantis, I mean, Namor. Pointy ear’d bastard.
Actually, he predated both the original Human Torch and Captain America among Marvel’s heroes. back in the 1940s — or was it the 1930s?
Might have been. Wasn’t much into those books at the time. Of course, wasn’t around in the 30s….
Short comments. For ancient civilizations and lost worlds….The Why Files on youtube has a lot of info. He tells stories but he links to what raw data he has and mostly debunks them but there are anomllies and unknowns he covers. Not exhaustive but entertaining. A good place to get info and get lost for hours at a time.
A lot on Tesla and the pyramids as geomagnetic power stations (if any one remembers Walt and Leigh Richmond, they used that in several stories.) Also a lot of details on problems with timing in Egyptology.
Long story for another time, but when I was younger I got to read several anthropology books written from the late 1800s through the 1930s including ones by L. Spragur DeCamp. Remarkably, they were fairly even handed and a lot more detailed on who did what to whom. They did not believe in Noble Savages but did believe that Neanderthals were more than brutes. The library and the books burned in a totally not suspicious fire in December of 78.
More to come….
They were proven right on the Neanderthals, who seemed to be innovators and creators.
Yes….and DeCamp covered that in his story the Gnarly Man. I think the reason why the old books had more accurate portrayals of peoples and civilizations rested on several legs.
First, they had not yet been subjected to Marxist deconstructionism
Second, they worked to be objective in their descriptions using what information they had. Even if they thought the civilization they were describing was inferior, they worked to describe it as was and let the readers draw their own conclusions.
Third, they all grew up with the general mindset that the past was golden somewhere somewhen….but it was the civ that was great not the wilds.
Fourth, the idea that evolution proceeded in one direction from simple to greater hadnt caught hold and poisoned everything. (It is this idea that makes a good straw man for those arguing against evolution.)
Finally, the men researching and writimg those.books largely went out and knew the world and the people in it. They also knew as Kipling wrote….there are 4 and 20 ways to write the lays….and everyone is right.
People are people but not interchangeable not even in the same culture soemtimes.
On conspiracy theories and fringe science…..
The first day of summer vacation in 1968 I sat with my whole family on the porch of our house and we talked about the tooics in these books we had called World of the Weird. Silly season stuff. UFOs. Big Foot. Loch Ness. So on. These discussion included Ball Lightning which at the time was considered nonsense.
We know its ball lightning is real now. Giant squids are real. Most conspiracy theories are real as it turnsout.
So probably preDryas flood civilizations are real.
Though why they would teach the survivers to build huge stacked buildings of heavy blocks that align with the stars….that I dont get. It iisnt easier it isnt simpler and when the pyramids were supposedly build every other civilization that existed except central and south america, were building with columns and archways.
Shoot maybe Lovecraft is closer to being right than the others.
Of course you feel the need to go to church. G-d wants you where he can keep a eye on you 🙂
That’s what I figure, yes.
clicky box….
c4c
…
“Unfamiliar, old, and unexplained” equals “creepy and evil” to some people. (Not every Victorian house has a ghost…)
Gobekli Tepe is estimated to be 10,000 years older than Great Zimbabwe. The later would have oral history among the locals, the former not so much. The site is still mostly unexplored and much of any detailed cultural explanation is probably guessing. Probably not much worse than other Neolithic sites or 80 percent of the cultures that followed since.
The fascinating thing is that modern day scholars can’t explain much past 5,000 years ago. And will gladly bury or dispute any hint of evidence that is counter to the official narrative. This leaves the door open for outsiders and crackpots. And the curious become even more curious about everything.
I’ll just note only a very small area a Gobekli Tepe has been dug into, and there are indications that the stuff still under the dirt (assumably on purpose, just as the Gobekli Tepe stuff was purposefully buried) is truly vast in scale.
The houses may not have ghosts, but it’s a very rare house old enough to have been around at that time that didn’t have someone doing the “spiritualist” fads in it.
And that’s before issues like early wave Eugenics, before Hitler’s boys made killing the useless eaters a thing that was publicly frowned upon.
There’s lots of options for old stuff being creepy besides “oh, we just don’t understand.”
Like the house with subdivided apartments I lived in in Asbury Park back in the late 70s. The floorboards creaked in a regular pattern, from what had become a kitchen, up the hall to the bedroom door, where they stopped, and paused….and then walked back the other way. It happened so often I eventually would say, “Oh, it’s you,” and keep doing whatever I was doing. (The first few times, which happened at 0 dark 30 over and over again, were a other story).
When I asked the landlord if anyone had died there he denied it. Loudly. A lot. Very much, “Methinks thou dost protest too much.” But by that time I was OK with it. There was never a sense of malice. And one time there was an overwhelming sense of a benign presense, unconnected to the phantom footsteps.
Since it’s been a while since my last architecture history class… Gobekli Tepi is the one with the really good bricks (that the neighbors have been pilfering for thousands of years – easier than firing your own) and the corbeled sewers, right?
… I suppose I could just look at my class notes. I still have them in the computer…
Gobekli Tepi is neolithic with large stone pillars quarried locally.
Ur was made of millions of bricks.
Egypt had both, but the scale of it’s stone structures and individual components are huge, plus the precision is uncanny on many structures. Many unanswered questions, but most of academia and the Egyptian officials are in no hurry to address them.
And most sites that have had useful materials has been scrounged by latter peoples.
It’s not really uncanny. Just careful and resourceful.
Boy, you want to het up a stonemason or construction guy, you tell him that there’s no way to duplicate Egyptian stuff without modern tools.
And then they get out the rope, the plumb bob, the surveyor stuff, and go to town.
I don’t believe so. It’s possible, but unlikely. The publicized part are the monumental block-animal stelles. And the avenues.
Given that it’s in Turkey, I’m surprised the Islamists have tried to destroy it.
*haven’t
Noble, bloody, savages, yet another thing that that idiot Rousseau foisted on us. The man was an absolute idea sh-t Midas. I put him up there with Marx as the two people the world could most have done without.
Yep.
The most amusing thing I read about archeologists came from Elizabeth Barber ( I think), who is both a linguist and a weaver. There was a site where the male archeologists were puzzled by the large number of baked clay spheres and disks, all lying near the doorways of ancient dwellings. Female crafty type finally came aboard and said, “Oh, those are warp-weighted loom weights and spindle weights.” (Warp-weighted looms have every warp thread held in place by a weight fastened to the end; the weaving is done from the top down. Don’t even want to try it). Why were all the weights near the door? Because whatever light came into the hut/cottage was brightest near the doorway, and the woman of the house could see to do her work.
And an interesting bit of trivia, is that a large number of Egyptian-style spindle weights have been found in southern Gaza. As though, around 1300 B.C., a bunch of women who spun Egyptian-style migrated up from Egypt…
Long ago, before the Internet, I read of warp-weighted looms. And the references were scant, so I imagined a horizontal loom with a beam and weights hanging over the beam.
I was wrong. It’s thirty years later, and I possess all kinds of looms: four-harness floor loom, little tabletop four-harness, backstrap, inkle…but I do not have a warp-weighted setup, nor do I plan to construct one. I’ll use gravity to ASSIST in weaving, not fight against it.
Hence MUCH of the more recent discussion on the Shroud of Turin, particularly looking at the pollens and such for dating.
And actually talking to people who specialize in fabric so they know things like “uh, yes, they could mend cloth that say got set on fire, and it wouldn’t be a patch.”
So if ancient civilizations were nobler and better, do you get a pass for all the despicable, thoughtless, or just culpably ignorant things you do?
Graham Hancock has spent his life looking at anomolies in archeology, the effects of the Younger Dryas flood and other things. He contends a preDryas flood civilization was the source of a lot of myths and apparent commonalities in histories, with the civilizations existing on the drowned continental shelves so evidence is largely swept away or covered in deep silt.
Netflix has a 12 part show about it. It is dry and boring but largely straight forward. Also he has a website and youtube discussions.
yeah. Heck Portugal has lost miles off its coasts in historical times…. to Earthquakes. Much less the melting of ice age icebergs.
During the last glacial maximum, Florida was about twice it’s current size. During the prior glacial minimum, it was barely there, a small spit of land.
all sort of interesting things turn up on that vast area of drowned land now offshore.
Florida man would have been unstoppable with that amount of territory.
For the record that’s another thing that frosts my cookies about the new agers authors. the destruction of records, etc. is always the Christians fault, never the Islamists. Including recycling the Canard about the Christians burning the library of Alexandria. Actually make that the canards about the Library at all.
Right? There is modern history of what happens when Islam takes over territory. While there is no reported destruction of texts, they visibly destroyed historical antique massive Buddhas. The former wouldn’t have been visible. Do not remember any reports of religious buildings being outright destroyed, but there are churches in Spain that still have Islam features that destroyed the original christian church internal and external facades when Islam overran the areas and the churches were taken over for mosques. (Sister & BIL have pictures from last month showing the history of these locations.)
There are Muslim records (written decades afterwards) that has one of Muslim conquerors of Egypt apparently destroying the library of Alexandria (apparently some Muslims approved of his action).
Mind you, there’s been so much nonsense concerning the library of Alexandria that it’s hard to know the truth.
Note, there’s also confusing about “which library of Alexandria”.
The most famous “repurposed” cathedral is probably the Hagia Sophia; Justinian was apparently a nasty piece of work, but the architectural design he fostered was among the best anywhere at any time.
Might be time to “unrepurpose” it…😉
Which is funny– and not ha-ha funny– since Christians are the ones that copied and stored the dang things.
And the monks took cool information to spread around.
They functioned as bleepin’ lending library, adn folks would borrow books to copy! Generally other monks, but it happened!
St. Albert the Great was famous for walking around Europe, stopping at monasteries, and going through their libraries for books (or book components) he hadn’t read/copied yet.
He’d wash off his dirt, but he generally wouldn’t let the monastery feed him or give him a guest room, without visiting the library first.
And of course he had St. Thomas Aquinas as his wingman for some of these expeditions.
They weren’t the only ones who did this, but Dominican friars had a lot more freedom to walk around and check things out.
The vast stretches of now-submerged land on the continental shelves is one of the first things I noticed when I first found sea-floor maps.
Any time anyone expounding based upon their expertness gets all hand wavy as to why nothing much is found from glaciation periods when sea levels were so much lower, while skipping completely over all that submerged land and that most people live near the coasts even now, they drop all kinds of “expert respect” points.
The Persian Gulf used to go all the way up to Ur. That’s why there’s all this stuff about seaports in Sumerian literature about Ur and surrounding area.
I think I mentioned this before on this blog, but it does explain a lot.
Oh, and they still haven’t found Elam, even though they know more or less where it ought to be, and it was an important city for thousands of years.
Ur of the Chaldees….(sp?)
This article talks about how there was probably a nice fertile, populated floodplain where the Persian Gulf is now, and then there was big postglacial age flooding, and then the Gulf slowly got bigger for a long time, and finally it slowly got smaller like it is today.
I forgot to link the article, so here it is.
https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html
“…Oh, and don’t sing me your sacrosanct science of archeology song. I still think mostly they’re looking under the street lights…”
Not only this (and it can be a lot), but from what I hear archeology is (mostly) pretty thoroughly infiltrated / wokerized these days, it’s not just My Favorite Theory Forever but also Anything Politically Incorrect is Banned. It was at least a few years ago when I first encountered ‘underground archeology’ — the kind that’s ‘published’ in out of the way corners of the Internet and semi-anonymously, because trying to get it into the journals would be futile, hazardous, or worse. Despite, or even because of, it being well-supported by careful work.
(I figure Our Esteemed Blogmistress has already heard of this; but lots of the rest of us may not have, yet.)
some of them. I wonder if there are some I havent found.
One thing I cannot understand….and I think it is my blindness….is why these old cities or sites were almsot entirely underground and so extensive. There is one in Indonesia that before the g9vt kicked everyone out what they thought was an old temple on a hill turned out to be the hill. A really big deep hill. Its deep like the monster cities in Larry Correias novels…..or HP Lovecraft.
Why did people do that? What were they hiding from? Were they hiding?
It was a big building, and it got partially buried over the millennia. Makes sense, anyway. Have you heard of the buildings and streets buried under Seattle? The structures excavated around San Francisco Bay? That all happened in less than 300 years.
Isn’t Mexico City built on top of Mexico City?
Tenochtitlan
settlements are often on rivers for transport reasons
rivers flood
therefore
However, this does not really explain the layered hill cities. So I’m guessing human movement of earth for some reason I don’t graps tonight.
Depends. Many cities literally get covered up. The residents move out, dirt starts to accumulate around the structures (blown by the wind), and no one sweeps it away. After a while, there’s hills where buildings once stood.
Sort of like my house when I get lazy about dusting… 😀
‘I was excavating my living room last week….”
As long as you don’t need to rent a Bobcat, it’s not out of control…it’s not out of control… 😛
Odds with heavy earthmoving equipment….
“Killdozer”
And now I am envisioning a Bubba-upped Bobcat… Just the thing for alien invasions….
Central America. Just a temple or two. Nope. Hundreds of acres of major complex of homes, temples, walls, roadways, etc., all hidden invisible under the jungle, and dirt, the foliage is rooted in. At multiple locations. In Egypt it is sand. Lidar scanners strip back foliage. Sand is being stripped back by satellite imaging patterns.
Because those that didn’t get buried fell apart and left no remains.
I’m rather curious about the possible 20,000 year old structure in Indonesia
I just saw Project Veritas video where they got a State Department official to admit on camera that the Great Replacement is real and he also flat out states that “Americans are not Leftists, but Latin Americans are.” I hope this spreads like wildfire.
SAH: sometimes this means driving two hours to service.
I see where just this month, the United Methodist Church lost more than a quarter of its members when the Africans (specifically The UMC of Ivory Coast) withdrew from the UMC because of gay marriage, the ordination of practicing homosexual and trans ministers, and in many other ways deviating from the Scriptures so much that they no longer consider US Methodists as Christians.
And a couple years ago, the UMC lost about a quarter of the US members, for the same reason.
Some of my neighbors travel 50 miles or more each way to go to a church that opted to stay traditional.
My own church has a meeting in a few weeks to affirm a particular statement of faith, and disassociate from one org we previously supported, that has jumped the theological shark.
Going to be a rather interesting meeting.
Our tiny church is staying, but it’s largely because it’s not directly affected and the members Just Can’t Believe it’s really that bad.
The volunteer group we work with voted to work with both sets of churches because there’s so much work to be done.
…I could justify writing a very advanced magical culture prior to this one by a massive coup through one of the members of the Royal Family and nearly a few thousand years of trying to rebuild the planet and housing the survivors of the various off world colonies on the only planet that could support them and various oaths and (CLASSIFIED)…
(And none of my cast has any illusions about the Dawn Empire as it was back then. It’s like the Imperium of Man-necessary, but barely tolerable in comparison to the alternatives.)
The “noble savage” myth is one of those memes that keeps coming through human beings like a cancer. It’s a return to childhood, in a lot of ways. That everything has an answer, and the answers are simple ones. Easy ones. That don’t require too much thinking or consideration. That they fulfill your own stereotypes is just a bonus, we promise! And the belief in the mythical past that we should return to…is another one.
I’m looking for tomorrow. There’s got to be something new out there…
FTFY. Most people are unaware of what past really means in terms of living.
Most of them have some very, very terrible illusions about what the Mythical Past involves. Mostly that they would be on top of the heap-which is BARELY better than upper middle class in the United States these days, minus a few perks.
And good medical care.
And any kind of selection in food.
And good hygiene in general.
If you really want to annoy one, point out that you are legally prevented from running a homeless shelter that lacks luxuries that kings and queens and emperors did without a couple centuries ago. Or, alternatively, that Augustus Caesar would have thought that homeless shelters were the homes of gods, since no mere mortal could have such wonders.
They won’t believe you, because they were taught that this is the Darkest Timeline and it Trump ever gets elected, it’ll be Handmaid’s Tale all the time.
Nah, many of them believe you and even know it’s true. But the doublethink gets popped out. I knew one who argued that shelters were not allowing in people who had even a sip of beer. . . which apparently negated everything.
https://thewriterinblack.com/2019/03/14/benefitting-from-prosperity-originally-the-poor-get-poorer-a-blast-from-the-past/
John W. Campbell did a trio of stories essentially riffing off, “what happens when life gets too easy.”
in the first, (The Machine), an alien machine has provided a perfect, no-effort-required civilization, but realizes it has helped too much and leaves, leaving the spoiled and pampered humans to rediscover the value of work. In the second, “The Invaders,” We learn humans have *not* learned, and because the Machine turned most of Earth into a garden, humans are just lazing along. Until the Tharoo arrive and take over. And start breeding humans to try and restore them…but within a couple of generations are breeding them as slaves. And the third, “The Rebellion,” covers what happens when the revived human race teaches the lesson of, “work for yourself,” to the now-complacent Tharoo. It’s a fun read.
Two or three quick ones. When I was in Saudi on the east coast a guy from Aramco took me out 30 miles out into the desert and showed me a fossilized skeleton of a large sea creature in a limestone cave. And when Hashing out in the desert I would often find sea shell a long way from the water.
And speaking of prehistoric child sacrifice, down in the southern most state there is a large lake with an island in the middle of it. A friend was shown a small dig site there where a skeleton of a small child/female was unearthed. The skeleton had all the ear marks of a typical Mayan civilization-type sacrifice according to the what my friend was told. And apparently there were other sign of possible religious-type cannibalism found there as well. Mind you at the time this was all part of a huge privately owned tract of land. The state came in and shut the site down as soon as it was notified of the find. AFAIK the site is still closed to all exploration.
There are sites and possible sites that are shutdown by tribes and gov, just because they “might” contain evidence that is contrary to the illusion that said tribe has been in that area “forever”. Also the academics seem to be allergic to any new facts that don’t match the current narrative. Doesn’t matter if it’s on private, gov, or tribal land.
Yep. The Kenebunkport (sp?) man. The tribe claimed him because they’d “always been there” so he MUST be their ancestor. Period. Even though floridly caucasian and probably mediterranean
Kennewick Man, maybe? Out in the Tri-cities, Washington, rather than in Maine?
Or heck, I dunno, maybe they had a Kennebunkport Man too…
It’s fairly easy in North Alabama to find focks full of tiny fossils.
Keep in mind that quite a few ancient civilizations that we know existed are poorly attested, if at all. Most of what we know about the Gauls/Celts, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Dacians and others comes to us second-hand, at best. For various reasons they either did not write down information about themselves, or the information was lost or destroyed deliberately.
We only learned about the Mesopotamians and Assyrians in any depth when people started digging in Iraq and found their cuneiform tablets in the tells that marked the sites of towns and cities. Many (most) of these haven’t ever been touched, and who knows what lies buried there?
We only have a tiny percentage of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, so we inevitably have a distorted view of them. Even foundational literature, like the lost poems of the Greek “Troy Cycle,” is lost for good.
For many years, we knew of the Hittites only from mentions in the Old Testament.
Until they were discovered, some German “Theologians” considered the “mention of Hittites in the OT” evidence that the OT was “just folklore”.
I think a lot of the reason for lack of first-hand information regarding these cultures is pretty straightforward. In many cases they did write things down. And they stored the most important records in the library or archive. But then their cities were destroyed through sieges. And it was traditional that the besiegers ran riot in a city if they successfully broke inside, looting, pillaging, raping, and… burning. Libraries and archives tend to have lots of flammable items in them.
So the records were destroyed when the civilization fell.
You don’t need to posit a fire to destroy them. Papyrus rots in about a century. Unfired clay tablets fall apart. Etc.
Indeed, one place has a whole collection because a palace DID get burned down, which fired all the clay tablets.
Or not. It could resurface in some Greek fragment in some earthed colony next year.
Within the Religious/Agnostic/Atheist discussion I can only remember my Bride’s Paramedic Partner, who spent about a year and a half reasonably aggressively proclaiming the superiority of Atheism.
Until one day when the hospital they were in had a short flash power outage while they were in an elevator.
His HEART FELT exclamation of “OH GOD!!” tended to give away his TRUE feelings/beliefs…
Maybe worth pointing out that the Book of Judges as a whole is about everything going wrong in Israel despite repeated divine intervention. Concluding verse: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Anyone can sin – it takes a king to make a whole nation sin.
Regarding the “peaceful savages of antiquity”, “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Richard Keeley is a good reference to reality. Of course, there were a couple of ideologically-driven putdowns, but in general it got positive reviews.
Thank you for verbalizing so very well what I have thought of Rousseau et al. I first heard about this theory in a Humanities class, and, having grown up in North Texas with many tales of the Comanches, and I could not reconcile it to what I had read…. kinda angered the prof because laughing and arguing with the Enlightenment was a bad thing….
Rosseau was FRENCH enlightenment. AKA Batshit.
Well, you know… French