The Destruction of Human History....

It is with deep anguish, that the overflowing criminality of humanity's past, is something that none of us today
can set ourselves a part from. Humanity then, has done this to humanity now. Right down to the jewelry we wear today. I sit here in front of this PC, mesmerized by thoughts of the artifacts lost in Alexandria. I believe all that you have brought to light here Slayer? Is just the beginning of knowledge that has been deliberately suppressed.
Travesty much.

You got me all bent now Slayer

reply to post by facelift


Don't sweat it my friend.

"Group Think" ain't my bag! Believe it!

Thinking for myself is not an issue. It's more like a problem.



Ancient history is one of the most fascinating subjects I read about on ATS. And SLAYER69's OP is an excellent example.

I've dabbled in ancient knowledge in the past, while not an expert it still fascinates me nonetheless.

I simply believe there is much in our human past that could apply to us in the here and now. To see this sort of knowledge gone from our collective history is sad.

I constantly read about ancient structures, ancient writings, ancient civilizations, so and so forth and am amazed at how arrogant we are as a species. I'm 49 years old and constantly interact with younger folks who are convinced they know so much more than I do.

That's cool with me. Hell, they could very easily be right.

We cannot learn from our ancestors? I for for one think we can.

It's cool if you disagree. It's cool.

After all, isn't that what ATS is all about?

Peace!

Just my $0.02 worth. Nothing more.

Originally posted by randyvs
It is with deep anguish, that the overflowing criminality of humanity's past, is something that none of us today
can set ourselves a part from. Humanity then, has done this to humanity now. Right down to the jewelry we wear today. I sit here in front of this PC, mesmerized by thoughts of the artifacts lost in Alexandria. I believe all that you have brought to light here Slayer? Is just the beginning of knowledge that has been deliberately suppressed.
Travesty much.

You got me all bent now Slayer

I'm not going to touch on the various obvious possibilities of suppression of knowledge by Governments not to mention what organizations such as the Vatican have squirreled away.

What do we have access to now?

Sorry buddy if I got you bent. It does suck

reply to post by SLAYER69
Hiya J. I'm with you on this one despite our differences on what's what in history.

Destroying our resources is a bad habit and yet it's a big part of what has put us where we are now. By this, I mean conquest and conflict has driven much of the human race and generated so much of our 'progress' that we could see the burning of books as inevitable. Not forgiveable...or acceptable...just a darker part of what drives humanity.

Burning books 1937
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/839ee52c094a.jpg[/atsimg]

Luckily for us as a race, we've been interconnected and shared different opinions and viewpoints for so many hundreds of years that channels have been created between sections of people. It's like a word-of-mouth internet! Like the old 'Underground Railroad' that funnelled runaway slaves to freedom, knowledge has been slushing around no matter how much PTB have tried to suppress it. The Persians saved lots of Western literature as the Roman Empire became Byzantine and fell. Later on, their own scholars copied out texts and hid them from their rulers who wanted them destroyed.

Knowledge has a loud voice and forever sings in one country when another tries to drown it out...

On the downside, with history being lost we're forever re-inventing the wheel. Imagine what stability would have done for our progress? We'll never know.

Thinking of wheels, we can add the North American medicine wheels (Oxbow medicine wheels) to the mix of your OP. Once upon a time, NA was probably littered with these huge stone structures. Only a few are left. Way back, they were cheerfully recycled into dry-stone walls or just shifted out of the way by guys who may not have noticed...much less given a good damn about them anyway. Railroads and agriculture took precedence...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/7d16a5ed61b6.jpg[/atsimg]

The Bagdhad Library (Ctesiphon image archive) was burnt down hundreds of years ago with all contents lost. Some of which would have been copies or original texts from the library at Alexandria...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3d05931c3102.jpg[/atsimg]

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/e6dedaeccf76.jpg[/atsimg]

The library at Nalanda ...another victim of arson and one of the earliest universities in the modern sense...
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f6cfdfbd83cb.jpg[/atsimg]

It seems that the concept that anything from the past should be preserved is a rather modern one. Even questionable relics were cut into pieces and distributed amongst various churches, and mummies were once used to power trains, or ground up as headache tinctures. In China hominid fossils were used in traditional medicine, and in South Africa the same mining activities that exposed fossil sites also destroyed much of them.

Surprisingingly the ruined state of the Colosseum was not the due to the ravages of nature alone.
It was once considered a convenient source of stone for newer building projects, such as St Peter's Basilica.
The greatest damage seems to have been done during the medieval period:

Severe damage was inflicted on the Colosseum by the great earthquake in 1349, causing the outer south side, lying on a less stable alluvional terrain, to collapse. Much of the tumbled stone was reused to build palaces, churches, hospitals and other buildings elsewhere in Rome. A religious order moved into the northern third of the Colosseum in the mid-14th century and continued to inhabit it until as late as the early 19th century. The interior of the amphitheatre was extensively stripped of stone, which was reused elsewhere, or (in the case of the marble façade) was burned to make quicklime.[12] The bronze clamps which held the stonework together were pried or hacked out of the walls, leaving numerous pockmarks which still scar the building today.

en.wikipedia.org...

Only the Enlightenment brought an interest in the ancient world, which the Christians since Justinian had so meticulously tried to destroy.
It is often downright miraculous that anything survived all the ideological destruction, ignorant carelessness and war-time bombings.
The survival of the three Mayan codices is amazing, considering they survived both the ravages of Bishop De Landa and their storage in Europe. The Dresden document narrowly survived the firebombing during World War II.
One shudders to think what would have happened to the scriptures hidden in the desert, such as the Gnostic material or The Dead Sea Scrolls, had they been found a century or two earlier.

I suppose the choice between what is important and not is rather cultural, and I wouldn't be surprised if the odd Yeti carcass has ended up as peasant's soup and medicinal powder.

reply to post by SLAYER69

reply to post by SLAYER69


No I didn't mean like you actually got me all bent Slay. We've touched on the lima skulls a few times already.
I often wonder how much Native American Indian knowledge has been lost? There must be some certainly ?
With whole tribes now extinct. Why has this subject never seemed like such a bummer before ? Snf though for sure. Prolly just about right to feel this way.

One of the saddest topics if you ask me. If i recall correctly wasn't there a series of books from the Roman Empire that contained various sciences from the time? Like engineering and herbal lore, something about a birth-control plant comes top mind. Only a couple of books survive to today. Someone more knowledgeable and awake than I will hopefully know what they are. Just a nibble of knowledge which is in some ways worse, since we get a idea of what the ancients knew. Heck if our electric grid and internet were to disappear we would leave less knowledge in some ways than people think for the future.

reply to post by skjalddis


"Another regretful loss, though somewhat different, is the knowledge that was held by the Druids. They reputedly held a great store of knowledge and history of all manner of things, but it was passed down orally, their laws forbade writing it down. Thus when they were wiped out by the Romans it was all lost."

Ah yes, and then later the Romans got sacked by barbarians and lots of their fine art and buildings destroyed, enter the dark ages. Knowledge mostly only surviving in the monasteries... I see a trend here.. "what comes around goes around" and "what goes up must come down"

I've also seen, in England, the wicked effigy desecration from the reformation and gorgeous old buildings blasted to smithereens from WWII. Sad. Won't people ever learn?

This is why I don't condone book burning of any kind, don't care if it's Koran or Satanic bible and disagree with it. We're robbing our future humans of learning as much as they can about us when we destroy texts or art. Our buildings aren't being made to last at all so those inevitably will be gone. Maybe the georgia guide stones will last awhile? Mount Rushmore? Lincoln monument? Washington monument? I also tend to think some people should take up writing on tablets to preserve our knowledge. Look at things from the past that did last the ages and try to emulate. I don't even think our paper will last, should probably at the least go back to papyrus.

Great topic OP star&flag

Great thread!!! Save and flag!
Cant wait for more peoples inputs.

A few points:

First, the Library of Alexandria contained COPIES of books that existed before it (and which existed in other libraries after its destruction (see Wikipedia article) AND (also check histories of Cleopatra.) There were undoubtedly original books, but much of the library was "tribute" -- books seized from ships, copied, and returned to the owners.

There's a lot of other lost material -- any time there's a conquest, the conquerors savage the culture of the victims. There's a lot of books lost during peacetimes, too, and books that go out of circulation and get lost simply because people lose interest in them. There were thousands of books printed during Shakespeare's time, but very few survive. There's no original books from Socrates (we have copies of copies of copies) and a lot of the plays of Aristophanes (my favorite playwright) are gone forever.

Books influence other books. What was lost in one book will (if it's good) be contained in another book. For example, run an Amazon search for a topic like "blacksmithing" and you'll come across not one book but hundreds, each one building on what was before. Books aren't a drop of priceless knowledge that appear and vanish.

They leave footprints on history. You may not have recognized them.

Originally posted by randyvs
I often wonder how much Native American Indian knowledge has been lost?

There's a HUGE amount of it being lost right now as non-Native Americans come in and modify ceremonies and practices (like sweat lodges) and make them their own. As Native Americans intermarry with others, they also lose their traditions.

And I'm speaking from experience. My great-grandfather was Cherokee and spoke no English. My family has no Native American traditions at all.

More of it is recorded than you might think. Some of it is heavily overlaid with European interpretations (I have some books of legends that are European retellings of native legends (any time you get a "princess" named "Little Fawn" you can start muttering "booooooogus!") but if you know the culture you can work backward to the story.)

...but that's a project for another year.

Originally posted by facelift
reply to post by SLAYER69

 

The ones you mentioned are definitely on top of the list...


A little closer to our day and age would be the Pillaging of Egypt via Dr. Hawass - the criminal...

In addition, the disappearance of The Book of Threads seems like a monumental loss to many as well...

What is The Book of Threads? I've never heard of that....

Originally posted by Signals
I'd like to add the stones covering the Great Pyramid at Giza being stripped off and used for Cairo building projects is a HUGE travesty HUGE...

Not to mention where is the capstone (if it existed)?

I know many of the covering stones were stripped off and used to build other buildings. As for the golden capstone, I'm quite sure that someone melted that mother' down quite a long time ago! .....It was probably the first thing to go!

its my understanding that we are all gods and godesses that have lost our way. we cant remember because the annunaki with other races have manipulated our dna. we once had 12 strands now we only have double helix dna. dont worry all thats hidden will be revealed and the planet is going back to the fifth dimension where we can be who we really are... peace

reply to post by moogle


Yes Moogle, your post reminded me of another great loss - much of the knowledge from Late Roman times up through the Middle Ages in Europe was stored up in monasteries, but in England we lost much of this when Henry VIII had them destroyed. I doubt whether anyone knows how much stuff was destroyed then, and anything that did survive ended up in private hands.

And another - we do know that many early manuscripts and books were lost from monasteries during the Viking raids, this would be all around the coast of Europe - England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France that I know about but also further afield. They would target the monasteries because they had learned that there was wealth to be had there.

peace
J

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas
I think modern man isn't that modern at all...

disturbing actually...

Yeah I know....if theuy are hiding history from us now, who's to say that the inhabitants of the past didnt hide history as well. Who knows how many civilizations have lived before ours?

Fantastic thread, this is what ATS is all about.

Here is the link for AATA an evolving database for conservation of international material cultural wealth.
aata.getty.edu...

There seems to be a cultural penchant for destroying the artifacts of "other" nations, tribes, religions. As if we were constantly trying to reinvent ourselves somehow. Or perhaps we've been in historical denial?
The losses you mention are pretty much my own list for ancient civilizations.

If we could only take a peek at what the Conquistadors and Catholic church destroyed in Central and South America!
So much knowledge lost which gives me an idea why we do this - those who control societies hoard knowledge for themselves and deny it to others.

Sometimes I wonder if humanity is not indeed actually in regression.

Tomorrow's history and lost wisdom is being made today and frankly it scares me. The amount of control certain groups have over the creation and dissemination of information will dictate the history of the future. Indeed, it has always been this way perhaps, none of us can truly know.

This is where Velikovsky and Joseph Campbell come into importance. What is left of our history is inscribed within the mythologies of peoples worldwide. The tales of Gods and monsters are the psychic imprint of cataclysmic events the humanity has suffered through.

History is much more than artifacts and monoliths, it is embedded in story and culture.
Somebody is trying to wipe that out too.
Cultural diversity programming is in fact, destroying it.
God how I can ramble when I first get up in the morning,

Now what did I do with that Spear Of Destiny I found at the pawnshop?

Great thread Slayer