Originally posted by Trauma
A perfect depiction of our heliocentric solar system, with the moon included (the Sumerians considered the Moon a planet). Pluto and Charon are even depicted as a tiny pair.

Here is a question. Why would they include Earth's moon in the depiction but not the several moons of the other planets in our solar system? If they considered our moon to be a stand alone planet, why not the others?

Thanks Ashley D, it made the thread a lot more interesting and it's only the second page so most people who open this thread should see it. I actually started this thread off of ideas I got from another thread I was replying to so I'm sure it would make a good thread of it's own too.

Ok. I'll look around a bit to see if it has already been posted on ATS and might post it eventually.

Originally posted by bigbert81
Why create drawings on clay and walls, if you have the technology to see millions of miles into space?

Makes you wonder if they were getting their info from somewhere/something else eh?

Well, let us think about this for a moment.

What evidence will our current civilization leave behind if something should wipe us out.

nothing

that is right, all of our information is stored on stuff that will either decay or be non-accesible to future societies.

Paper? Rots, burns, fades, gets wet and bleeds away text ... simply cannot last unless sealed extremely well. Anything that lasts, well, why did they make markings on thin sheets of wood?! How primitive and absurd!

Electronic. Well, for one, we have digital drives fail, get corrupted, erased by magnetic fields, and other forms of digital loss of information, add to it, decay, corrosion, then, inability to access the data because of our archaic system of delivering energy to odd boxy devices of silicone, metal, glass, and magnetic discs, usually with a weird flat or box with a black front attached to it. Maybe there is something to the pattern of metal ... nope, symmetrical (solder), the must have worshiped conformity, that's the ticket! (somewhat true).




You see ... if you want to make something permanent, text/drawings in stone, clay, metal, in caves, or where ever ... makes just as much or more sense. It has an ability to be deciphered (even if incorrectly) by future generations millenia in the future.


A truly advanced society or person should realize this.

What if we suffered a greatly horrible fate in the near future. Nuclear war, major asteroid strike. It has the potential of destroying the very way of life. No more international commerce, no electricity. We would be living off the land and surviving the best we could.

How would you communicate to future generations about the technology you took for granted? How would you tell of our explorations of space, your knowledge of the solar system, the governmental system, and every other facet of life we don't realize we rely on so much more than we did even 100 years ago?



Think about it. Cave drawings, stone carvings, clay tablets ... writing in your alphabet that may not exist in the future, drawing things that people will not know about and have never seen.

But you say, there is evidence! But wait, doesn't metal rust? Don't we have bridges falling down less than 100 years old? Do not a lot of buildings get condemned? How many structures are in your country over a 1000 years old? How about 6000 years old?

If a catastrophe did happen, what wasn't destroyed would be by natural processes over time because there would be nothing to maintain them. Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, rust, weathering, over thousands of years would take away most traces of our existence, even our landfills would turn mostly to soil. Cars rust away in coastal areas as people drive them!

Yes, some of what we have will be preserved, but, not most of it, and things do seem to get buried over time.




Viewing things in this way doesn't mean I believe Stitchen, or anything in particular, but, I think it is good to give a little bit of credit to people who took the time and effort to scribe something for the future. Maybe it isn't all stories, maybe we can take some of it at face value.

I do agree, some of it could be fiction, but, I cannot say none of it is non-fiction, and it is not fair to pick and choose which you want to believe based on pre-conceived notions of their society, or a thought that the people of the past couldn't be as smart nor advanced as us ... the very well may have been more advanced, but in a different way.



I do see what looks like a sun, and a bunch of what could be planets. The far off dot is interesting. I would more expect the conclusion that is from another part of the galaxy/universe, since it is so far away from the cluster around the star, if going along with that being our solar system. In fact, I would even consider it to be our star's twin, since we now know most stars have a twin or triplet. Brown dwarf? Nibiru? I don't know, and I am not one who really believes in it, but I entertain the idea, because most things are technically possible, we know so little despite what mainstream science claims.


I do much prefer skeptics, doubters, disbelievers, and nay-sayers to at least take a moment to consider things, and discuss/debate with an open mind. Be polite and add to the topic. Negativity is an ugly color to put on, and it doesn't reflect well on the wearer.

No one says you have to agree, but civility is an ATS standard.

Originally posted by Ketzer22
what I don't understand is if they were so advanced, why make drawings on clay? Why not do something on photoshop?

Originally posted by bigbert81

Why create drawings on clay and walls, if you have the technology to see millions of miles into space?

Tell me if you wanted someone to translate your work a few thousand years from now & knowing language might change you would want a picture, but would you make a tiff or jpg & burn it on a DVD for them hoping their latest media readers go back a few thousand years & then their sofware is able to traslate a tiff - of course that would be assuming the world didn't collapse a few times & they even have electricity......

Makes sense to me that the easiest medium for two eyed thinking creatures to translate would be pictures that can actually be viewed thus Clay on a wall or in a cave in the earth would be much more likely to be found & translated rather than a file on some medium that is no longer valid.

I love stuff like these pictures & I suspect there's many more that we have not yet seen or are kept under wraps for only a few to see.








[edit on 7-2-2008 by verylowfrequency]

Originally posted by FreeThinkerIdealist

Well, let us think about this for a moment.

What evidence will our current civilization leave behind if something should wipe us out.

I see we are on the same wavelength here, but you posted as I was typing. hehe. Glad I'm not alone.

Originally posted by Ketzer22
Sumerians are very interesting indeed.. But what I don't understand is if they were so advanced, why make drawings on clay? Why not do something on photoshop?

Because clay stays preserved for much longer then computer :p especially outside in bad weather.

Originally posted by TheWalkingFox


"Cool" trumps "factual" it would appear. Maybe we should come up with some bad history and make a million bucks.

Awe, but those who know & control the most history do make millions & even billions of bucks. Maybe you could even get people to fight about who was where or did what first, maybe you could even turn them against one another to start wars & such. I think you just might be on to something there.





[edit on 7-2-2008 by verylowfrequency]

Is there any chance - and I know, I`m going way out on a limb with this one...

but is there ANY remote chance that the tablet might actually be showing Stars? Like, the stars in the sky? That you can see with the naked eye and everything? Maybe some important ones, like... what`s that one in the north called....

I know, doesn`t have the appeal of the lizard people, but it might be worth examining.

Originally posted by RuneSpider


By biased i meant taking anything with a preconceived idea.

I think bias and taking anything with a preconceived idea cuts both ways.

If you are open to the idea of ancient civilizations being far more advanced than we generally give them credit for, and open to the possibility that ancient 'gods' might have been extra-terrestrial entities, then one might read ancient texts and view them in a certain light.

If, however, one is pre-disposed to believing the current generally accepted view... we are the pinnacle of human civilization (thus-far) and references to gods are a mixture of myth and allegory, then one will read ancient texts and view them in a completely different light - the mainstream outlook of today.

Both viewpoints come with a healthy (or not so healthy) dollop of bias and preconception.

Personally, I'll keep an open mind on this. It is entirely possible that the Sumerians were being literal (and truthful) when recording their tales about the 'gods'. Then again, they may have just been interpreting natural phenomena, and ascribing 'gods' to those events.

With regard to their advanced knowledge, as potentially indicated by that tablet. Yes, they may indeed have had advanced knowledge of the solar system... but then again, that extra dot might just be a slip of the hammer and chisel by the person who inscribed it. lol

Who knows eh?