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Post by Ian Thomas on Aug 9, 2015 9:03:23 GMT 10
If I recall my ancient history right, Herodotus was told by ancient Egyptian priests that long before them, there was a "Zep Tepi". Which sort of translates as "The First Time". By which they meant a high civilisation like their own with temples, megalithic buildings etc. The figures Herodotus quoted, somethng like 10,000 years before his time, circa 2500 years ago, made no sense. That would be about 12,000 years bp, the end of the Ice Age. Now there's this ..
This sort of stuff, as in long lost Pleistocene-vintage civilisations, has been the territory of Von Dunnycan type hucksters ever since I can remember *. But I think with finds like the above turning up and bearing in mind the certified age of Gobekli Tepe, circa 9500 years bp, about the same as the Sicilian monoloith ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe.. we're gonna have to take the idea seriously. Which means first up, moving the hordes of nutcases and ancient-aliens kooks out of the picture. *. Yeah, I got Fingerprints of the Gods on my bookshelf. But don't be alarmed, sis gave it to me. And she didn't buy it. She won it for being a good customer at Dymocks.  |
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Post by dennisw on Aug 9, 2015 10:22:52 GMT 10
I cannot remember the source, like you I have consigned a lot of this stuff to the realms of improbable myth, but there was something from an ancient Greek author who claimed that the Almighty remakes the world every 7,000 years. An Egyptian scholar with whom he was studying was claimed to have said, "You Greeks think you are an ancient people but have not even seen the world remade once, we Egyptians have experienced it twice."
What is meant by "remade" is not clear, but it could mean that civilisation regularly collapses whether through man made folly or natural disaster we have yet to discover.
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Post by vincent on Aug 9, 2015 23:30:13 GMT 10
I cannot remember the source, like you I have consigned a lot of this stuff to the realms of improbable myth, but there was something from an ancient Greek author who claimed that the Almighty remakes the world every 7,000 years. An Egyptian scholar with whom he was studying was claimed to have said, "You Greeks think you are an ancient people but have not even seen the world remade once, we Egyptians have experienced it twice." What is meant by "remade" is not clear, but it could mean that civilisation regularly collapses whether through man made folly or natural disaster we have yet to discover. This reminds me of one of Isaac Asimov's short stories, Nightfall. (Downloadable pdf here: www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf ) |
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Post by vincent on Aug 9, 2015 23:34:44 GMT 10
I cannot remember the source, like you I have consigned a lot of this stuff to the realms of improbable myth, but there was something from an ancient Greek author who claimed that the Almighty remakes the world every 7,000 years. An Egyptian scholar with whom he was studying was claimed to have said, "You Greeks think you are an ancient people but have not even seen the world remade once, we Egyptians have experienced it twice." What is meant by "remade" is not clear, but it could mean that civilisation regularly collapses whether through man made folly or natural disaster we have yet to discover. I favor this many cycles of rise and collapse idea, because that gives us a way to integrate the bible's short duration of human civilization with an ancient earth. Given that the words which are translated as days in the early chapters of Genesis are really words suggesting indistinct periods of time, which could mean eons, this notion does fit into what the bible actually does say as opposed to what people traditionally have assumed it says. This is also the reason I find Out of Place Artifacts (OOPS) interesting. |
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Post by Isengard on Aug 11, 2015 5:42:34 GMT 10
There is a very convincing theory that there were fairly advanced societies and cultures in the late Ice Age and the reason there is little trace of them is that they were mostly situated around the sea coasts which have now been inundated by many metres of sea level rise. This is in some ways plausible since in an era of low population density, with maybe a handful of millions of humans on the entire planet they would likely cluster in the richest and most habitable areas - the coasts. However, it does seem to imply that these regions inundated quickly and the cultures were lost and unable to move themselves. This seems unlikely but we do know there were major floods like the inundation of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There are certainly known to be human settlements from the Ice Age period drowned in the Black Sea.
I also have von Daniken and other like similar rubbish like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Costello, Hancock, Icke, etc. I also like more focused and reasonable stuff such as David Hatcher Childress or Emanuel Velikovsky. However, my interest is academic. I am a historian, so I am interested in alternate and 'popular' history and how it distorts historical process and produces poor argument.
Most ancient cultures had legends of older lost cultures which preceeded them. Often we have to be careful as these are apocryphal - designed to show people what their ancestors did wrong and were destroyed for (Sodom, etc) or about moral decline leading to disrespect or the gods and subsequent punishment (Atlantis, etc). They are not always literal, a mistake made fifty times a chapter by the likes of Daniken. Herodotus is only really loosely a historian and was experimenting with the foundations of historical method.
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Post by vincent on Aug 11, 2015 5:58:16 GMT 10
... these are apocryphal ... They are not always literal .... Those like Van Daniken have a bias toward these being literal, so they make the jump and declare that they are literal. You want to believe that they are metaphor, myth, etc., so you make the jump and declare that they are not literal. There is no proof for either interpretation. |
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Post by Isengard on Aug 12, 2015 22:09:23 GMT 10
... these are apocryphal ... They are not always literal .... Those like Van Daniken have a bias toward these being literal, so they make the jump and declare that they are literal. You want to believe that they are metaphor, myth, etc., so you make the jump and declare that they are not literal. There is no proof for either interpretation. By the very nature of History there is, indeed, no proof. However, the interpretations placed on things by the likes of Von Daniken are mostly spurious and I'll try to explain why. Von Daniken, Hancock, etc make their crust by finding interesting and anomalous pictures and depictions from ancient cultures, usually ones with no obvious explanation - e.g. with no text associated to explain the content, in languages which are not understood, etc. The 'odd' things shown in the pictures, etc are then interpreted as possibly showing an alien in a space ship, etc or humans interacting with aliens, or whatever. Taken solely on their own such pictures are intriguing and whet the public's interest. I've made a pretty big study of these works, as I mentioned above, and there are endless problems with them. Allow me to elaborate. First and most obvious is that the pictures and 'facts' deployed are selective. It is easy to take a handful of pictures from a smattering of world cultures and use these as 'proof' that humans interacted with aliens at some past date. However, once you start to look at the entire corpus of art and evidence from these cultures you can see that these pictures are not representative and are usually pretty explicable once placed into a broader context. Let's say human cultures in the past had been visited by aliens this would likely not have appeared as an ambiguous side issue, depicted in a scattering of unclear and arguable artworks. None of the cultures Von Daniken used has a large number of such pictures, they are just a sampling of artworks chosen because they could be interpreted as he wanted. The well known Mayan king in his spaceship one is fully in keeping with Mayan artistic style and when put with others it cannot be convincingly interpreted as a spaceship. To elaborate. If all our writing and language systems vanish and are not understood in 1000 years future archaeologists looking at only our pictures would find some that clearly show aliens, does that mean we are interacting with them? No. So any depictions could be simple artistic license, simply ambiguous and hard to understand or, far more likely, mostly depictions of gods, demons, etc. Pictures of angels or the devil found in the future could easily be misinterpreted as winged aliens or evil aliens, etc. As I said above, the most likely explanation for depictions of weird creatures is that they show deities. Superficial explanations of spacesuits, etc don't hold much water. The Nazca Lines are a great example. Are they to communicate with aliens? Almost certainly not, they are to communicate with divine beings in the heavens - hardly a novel concept. It is a very one-eyed and unconvincing explanation to see them any other way. 'Alternate' historians tend to pick and chose their evidence from a multitude of potential evidence and ignore the vast majority which does not conform to their view. From a historical standpoint this invalidates the entire process since the origin of all our information is the source material you cannot simply ignore what you don't like, you have to account for it and come up with convincing explanations why certain evidence is better than the rest. You can't ignore what you don't like. This is why I would dispute the idea that interpretations are equal in both cases, those interpretations which ignore all contrary evidence and simply assert a hypothesis based on a selective and limited use of the source material are, by their nature, less convincing. One great example of this is in a book (I think by Hancock, it's been a while!) where he takes a map of New York and uses it to 'prove' some occult influence on the founders by superimposing pentagrams, etc on the city. Superficially this is striking, so wow if you draw lines between the Empire State Building and the New York Stock Exchange, etc it makes a pentagram! Proof that evil occultists control the USA! Of course it is nothing of the sort. Anyone could easily pick and choose significant locations in a major city and connect them to form geometric patterns. Baigent and Leigh often make a lot of the architectural geometry, "the angle of the toilet door frame was 13 degrees which is the holy number of Baphomet, proving that the castle was used by his cult!" forgetting the other 999 door frames in the castle which aren't at 13 degrees. This kind of history is built on massive leaps of logic without considering any alternate viewpoints, again unacceptable in real historical investigation. Having noted a doorway at 13 degrees Baigent would take this and run with it into a massive explanation of how the castle was clearly, therefore, a stronghold of the cult of X and so must have been used to shelter the descendants of Christ, etc. All this built on one flimsy assertion. Assertion is another point here. Alternate historians will often simply assert something and then move on without any supporting evidence or consideration. A good example of this is David Icke who arguing that Princess Diana was killed in an occult sacrifice simply stated as part of his proof that the underpass where the death occurred was an ancient site of moon goddess worship and the death happened on some holy festival to that goddess, hence it's a sacrifice. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. It's assertion. If you wrote that in a History exam you'd get zero marks for failing to support your claims with any credible evidence. On my first day at university one of the professors used Holy Blood, Holy Grail as an example of how not to write history. He ran through it's explosive claims and explained how they got to their conclusion. He then knocked down the whole argument by showing how certain assertions in it were wrong and the authors did not know the period well or accurately (based on actual evidence). Given that their argument was based on a series of logical leaps from limited evidence to limited evidence knocking out even one piece was enough to collapse the whole thesis. I don't know for sure what happened in the past but I can absolutely assure you that genuine historians applying rigorous and researched historical methodology produce interpretations which are far more convincing than those of amateurs or those blinded by a zeal to push their own interpretations or (more likely) make some cash with intriguing theories! |
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Post by vincent on Aug 13, 2015 2:41:04 GMT 10
Yes, I can see what you're saying and I find nothing wrong with any of it. I've had vague thoughts along the same lines, but I never could have stated them as clearly as you have.
You wrote, "Alternate historians will often simply assert something ...." I find that they protect themselves from that charge by saying, "Is it possible that ....?" or "If we assume ... then does that not explain the facts?" They can truthfully say that they never made a solid claim, but they certainly do imply certain things.
I've never seen the pentagram on a map of New York stuff, but I've seen the pentagram on Washington DC to "prove" that the Freemasons designed Washington DC.
All of this rational stuff having been said, one thing keeps me looking at this sort of thing: The solid things from which the loonies spin their theories, such as the very real ruins at Tiahuanaco, or the Egyptian pyramids, or out-of-place artifacts, etc. I'm no kid anymore, but those things still make me wonder. The difference is that, as I've grown older and hopefully wiser, I'm less inclined to jump on the ancient aliens boinking humans to create a master race for some obscure reason theories.
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Post by Ian Thomas on Aug 13, 2015 13:35:42 GMT 10
Great posts Insengard (y)
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Post by Isengard on Aug 13, 2015 22:36:21 GMT 10
It's nice to be able to provide some kind of 'expertise' on this board. With the science I am strictly a layman, but History is what I do as well as Archaeology and other bits and bats. I have a very extensive collection of 'alternate' history books built up over years of visits to second hand book shops and I never tire or picking holes in this stuff!
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Post by Ian Thomas on Aug 19, 2015 20:23:52 GMT 10
Is good stuff Isengard. haven't had a chance to put thoughts together yet. Might get a break tomorrow.
Main difference between megaliths-in-the-ground versus Graham Hancock et al is we're talking actual artifacts with certified dates all round the same age and not attributable to any classic civilsation. Hancock tries to weave a tale of a global ice age civilisation on the basis of the pyramids, Angkor and couple other sites (Great Zimbabwe?). The snag is, his candidate super-civilisation relics are all different dates, spread across historical times. None predates the earliest known cultures (Mesopotamia/Egyptian Old Kingdom). Then he throws in a whole bunch of pseudo bs in the style of von-Dunnycan.
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Post by Isengard on Aug 22, 2015 1:20:03 GMT 10
Is good stuff Isengard. haven't had a chance to put thoughts together yet. Might get a break tomorrow. Main difference between megaliths-in-the-ground versus Graham Hancock et al is we're talking actual artifacts with certified dates all round the same age and not attributable to any classic civilsation. Hancock tries to weave a tale of a global ice age civilisation on the basis of the pyramids, Angkor and couple other sites (Great Zimbabwe?). The snag is, his candidate super-civilisation relics are all different dates, spread across historical times. None predates the earliest known cultures (Mesopotamia/Egyptian Old Kingdom). Then he throws in a whole bunch of pseudo bs in the style of von-Dunnycan. I think there is a genuine and clear argument about prehistoric cultures and things like early technologies and buildings. However, the likes of Hancock have set back this sort of research into the realms of pseudo nonsense. |
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