Records of Ancient Civilizations

[Oozlefinch]

It appears six separate "Cradles" sprung up nearly simultaneously. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India (Indus Valley), Ancient China, Ancient Andes and Mesoamerica.

And each built upon those that came before them.

The biggest difference is that this is also the time that written language started, in addition to more permanent structures. It is not that others did not come before them, it is just that they left little behind to tell us about them.

 

[code1211]

Nah, runes were a way of writing, it was a way to record. The runes are an adaptation of a writing system, they seem to basically been ripped from various alphabets, mainly the Greek and Alpine alphabets, so the inventors probably were people who had travelled and learned foreign alphabets and decided to use them for Germanic languages.

I'm watching a lecture series named "The Mysterious Etruscans".

I'm also a native of Minnesota where the Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed and that some think was left by Norse adventurers.

The narrator mentions that the writing of the Etruscans and Runes are very similar. He theorized that they traded with each other. This dating would date it before 300 BC.

It was interesting to me.

 

[multivita-man]

The advent of farming changed everything, including our DNA. It was a momentous development. In Europe, about 10,000 or so years ago, farmers from the Middle East arrived and began pushing out the hunter gatherers who had been on the Continent for 30,000 or so years prior to that. They were later joined by another wave of farmers from Eurasia and modern day Russia. Farmers had such an advantage over hunter gatherers that I guess they just quickly drove some of these groups into extinction. The only other event I can think of that's anything like it is when Europeans arrived in the Americas and completely wiped out indigenous communities in some cases.

 

[joluoto]

I'm watching a lecture series named "The Mysterious Etruscans".

I'm also a native of Minnesota where the Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed and that some think was left by Norse adventurers.

The narrator mentions that the writing of the Etruscans and Runes are very similar. He theorized that they traded with each other. This dating would date it before 300 BC.

It was interesting to me.

Well one of the writing systems that influenced runes were the Alpine alphabets, and the Alpine alphabets were in turn based on the Etruscan alphabet.

 

[What if...?]

I think your correct. Göbekli Tepe had to be built by a very sophisticated and advanced civilization for that time, 9000 BC or there about. It is said those who built it, buried it on purpose and moved on. To where no one knows. I'm sure glaciers, the rise in sea levels, etc. destroyed much of the evidence of even more advanced ancient civilizations. Then too, one must know where to dig to find anything. A lot of our discoveries are totally by chance like a Shepard tripping over a rock or something akin to that.

There's a lot of myths out there dealing with ancient civilizations, but it is said each myth has a grain of truth to it,

Another factor is human beings are great at reutilizing things.

There are many places where they're pretty site the builders of the buildings did not quarry the stone they were built from.

They had built them from the ruins of earlier peoples.

 

[code1211]

The advent of farming changed everything, including our DNA. It was a momentous development. In Europe, about 10,000 or so years ago, farmers from the Middle East arrived and began pushing out the hunter gatherers who had been on the Continent for 30,000 or so years prior to that. They were later joined by another wave of farmers from Eurasia and modern day Russia. Farmers had such an advantage over hunter gatherers that I guess they just quickly drove some of these groups into extinction. The only other event I can think of that's anything like it is when Europeans arrived in the Americas and completely wiped out indigenous communities in some cases.

I FEEL like the encounters of the homo sapiens with the Neanderthals produced the hybrids that we are today.

Standing in line at the grocery store or watching the football games, I am constantly amazed at the differences in the builds and stature of the people I encounter.

There are people who are short and thick and others who are tall and thin. It's difficult to not believe that there are NOT genes dictating the differences.

 

[Perotista]

Another factor is human beings are great at reutilizing things.

There are many places where they're pretty site the builders of the buildings did not quarry the stone they were built from.

They had built them from the ruins of earlier peoples.

Exactly, what comes to mind is the Temple of Jupitor in Baalbec which was built on top of a previous temple foundation. Some of the stone weighing 3,000 tons. I don't think anyone knows what was there prior to the Romans.

 

[Somerville]

Exactly, what comes to mind is the Temple of Jupitor in Baalbec which was built on top of a previous temple foundation. Some of the stone weighing 3,000 tons. I don't think anyone knows what was there prior to the Romans.

The temple below the Temple of Jupiter, where it has been examined, seems to show similarities with the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem. German archaeologists dug a hole in the ground, in the area of what is thought to be the courtyard of the temple and found enough artifacts to show that there had been a settlement on the spot that dated back to the Neolithic period.

Examination of the Deep Sounding in the Great Courtyard of the Jupiter Sanctuary at Baalbek – the Lithic Evidence of the Southern section

Examination of the Deep Sounding in the Great Courtyard of the Jupiter Sanctuary at Baalbek – the Lithic Evidence of the Southern section

www.academia.edu

Though short, the paper is a bit difficult to read as the English translation has some grammatical errors.

 

[multivita-man]

I FEEL like the encounters of the homo sapiens with the Neanderthals produced the hybrids that we are today.

Standing in line at the grocery store or watching the football games, I am constantly amazed at the differences in the builds and stature of the people I encounter.

There are people who are short and thick and others who are tall and thin. It's difficult to not believe that there are NOT genes dictating the differences.

Anywhere from 1-8% of human DNA contains DNA from extinct hominid species. People with any European ancestry are likely to have Neanderthal DNA. People in Asia and perhaps even Indigenous peoples of the Americas may have some Denisovan DNA. They've discovered through genetic sequencing that West Africans have the DNA of a ghost species for which records haven't been found but probably exists due to certain kinds of genetic 'echoes' in modern day Africans.

 

[Oozlefinch]

The advent of farming changed everything, including our DNA.

Oh, this is undisputed. And we can even see proof of it.

Like all animals, humans originally were lactose intolerant. We even got proof of this in Otzi, the ice mummy that was frozen around 5 kya. He was lactose intolerant, as that was the very start of the era of agriculture and humans had not evolved yet the ability or need to digest milk.

The ability to digest milk simply made it more likely that somebody would survive long enough to have kids, then pass along that ability.

 

[Mircea]

I see no reason to doubt that, with all the changes going on with the ice sheet etc. But even in more stable times, civilizations flourished and then for reasons, fell. It doesn't mean everyone everywhere went backwards, right?

You are right in that it doesn't mean everyone everywhere went backwards.

It would be stupid and nonsensical to say that Australian Aborigines had gone backwards when they hadn't gone anywhere at all. The same could be said for North American tribal groups and sub-Saharan tribal groups who still hadn't figured out what a house was or the benefit of growing crops.

There was an advanced civilization in South America that did collapse for reasons unknown. Actually, there were about three advanced civilizations in South America that collapsed and then much, much later, there were 2x-3x as many that collapsed for reasons unknown and then you have the civilizations extant at the time the Spanish arrived.

Ancient civilizations in India/Pakistan collapsed for reasons unknown. Southeast Asia is the only region that appears to have continually advanced, although it can be said that Chinese civilization ultimately stagnated due to Confucianism and then collapsed politically, socially and economically, but not scientifically.

The Greek-firsters are very ethnocentric. Civilization to them is basically the eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia, much in the same way civilization for the Romans was anywhere Roman soldiers were, and that is the same view of religions that originated in Mesopotamia and the Levant.

Mesopotamia really did collapse and it was chaos for about 1,000 years.

Greece really was a hop-skip-and-a-jump backwards scientifically. We go from the Earth being a sphere and orbiting the Sun to Earth being flat and the center of the Universe.

If there was one thing you could do to change the world, it would be travel back in time and slay Aristotle's mother and father. If it wasn't for Aristotle, we would have landed a man on the Moon 500 to 1,000 years ago instead of 52 years ago.

That's the harm that Greek civilization caused Humankind.

Medically speaking, Mesopotamia was on a par with 19th Century Europe/America. That's the damage the Greeks did. No telling how many Millions died because of the Greeks.

I won't even get into the Greeks concocting the concept of Hell because of their flat-Earth nonsense or their concoction of a soul because they couldn't understand why people are conscious and self-aware.

That nonsense continues to have a negative impact socially, medically and scientifically to this day.

 

[Oozlefinch]

The narrator mentions that the writing of the Etruscans and Runes are very similar. He theorized that they traded with each other. This dating would date it before 300 BC.

Questionable at best.

The oldest known runes only date to around 150 CE. And the Etruscan written language (which was based on that of the Greeks) was largely dead by 400 BCE. By that time even the remaining Etruscans had abandoned their own writing system and adopted that of the Romans (which was also based on the Greeks). And most believe that the runes came from neither the Romans or Etruscans, but from the Veneti, a group that inhabited modern day eastern Italy and Western Slovenia.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Greece really was a hop-skip-and-a-jump backwards scientifically. We go from the Earth being a sphere and orbiting the Sun to Earth being flat and the center of the Universe.

Oh nonsense.

You are aware that the learned of Greece knew the Earth was round, right? Just as they did in Europe during the time of Columbus.

Pythagoras wrote about the planet being round in the 6th century BCE, and Parmenides in the 5th century BCE. Plato talked about the planet being a sphere in the 4th century BCE. He picked that up from Socrates, and then passed it along to Aristotle.

By the 3rd century BCE Eratosthenes computed the size of the planet, and was less than 10% off in the actual size. By the second century BCE, Seleucus was writing the oldest heliocentric papers, that the sun was the center of the system and not the Earth.

So I have absolutely no idea where you are getting that from, it is almost the exact opposite of reality.

 

[Fishking]

Greece is sometimes called the cradle of western civilization. But the first human civilization was Sumeria, in what is now modern Iraq. It started several thousand years before Greek civilization. This is where the first cities, specialization of labor, a system of coins and currency, systems of writing, trade and commerce, and other signs of civilization first developed.

Yeah...I was going to say that I've NEVER heard ancient Greece being described as the first civilization, but the birthplace of democracy and western thought, as you're pointing out. Egypt and many others were so much older.

Then throw in that they are now finding even older civilizations that have pushed back the timeline of what they previously though, with places like Gobekli Tepe going back as far as 9,500 BC and showing decent levels of advancement.

Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[ataraxia]

Yeah...I was going to say that I've NEVER heard ancient Greece being described as the first civilization, but the birthplace of democracy and western thought, as you're pointing out. Egypt and many others were so much older.

Then throw in that they are now finding even older civilizations that have pushed back the timeline of what they previously though, with places like Gobekli Tepe going back as far as 9,500 BC and showing decent levels of advancement.

Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yeah I had seen that too. But I am not sure that is still, technically speaking, considered a civilization. It was not built by people who had built cities, adapted agriculture, or had specialization of labor. As impressive as it is, it was just a temple built by nomadic Hunter-gatherers.

 

[Fishking]

Yeah I had seen that too. But I am not sure that is still, technically speaking, considered a civilization. It was not built by people who had built cities, adapted agriculture, or had specialization of labor. As impressive as it is, it was just a temple built by nomadic Hunter-gatherers.

That wasn't my impression at all. It's a pretty developed settlement that has only had a tiny bit of it excavated. You don't get that type of building development from hunter-gatherers. I could be wrong but that wasn't what my previous impressions where.

 

[code1211]

Anywhere from 1-8% of human DNA contains DNA from extinct hominid species. People with any European ancestry are likely to have Neanderthal DNA. People in Asia and perhaps even Indigenous peoples of the Americas may have some Denisovan DNA. They've discovered through genetic sequencing that West Africans have the DNA of a ghost species for which records haven't been found but probably exists due to certain kinds of genetic 'echoes' in modern day Africans.

Nature is an interesting laboratory.

We flatter ourselves to think we are superior.

Our primary purpose in this lab might be to host the actually favored species of a really good virus.

Creating plastic bottles might be only an interesting, unintended consequence.

 

[code1211]

Questionable at best.

The oldest known runes only date to around 150 CE. And the Etruscan written language (which was based on that of the Greeks) was largely dead by 400 BCE. By that time even the remaining Etruscans had abandoned their own writing system and adopted that of the Romans (which was also based on the Greeks). And most believe that the runes came from neither the Romans or Etruscans, but from the Veneti, a group that inhabited modern day eastern Italy and Western Slovenia.

The person who is delivering the lectures in this series noted at the beginning that the records of the Etruscans are sketchy at best.

He said that is why he titled the lecture series, "The Mysterious Etruscans".

I'm on about the 5th or 6th lecture and he seems to be examining the burial structures and producing more direct evidence than in the previous few lectures.

 

[ataraxia]

That wasn't my impression at all. It's a pretty developed settlement that has only had a tiny bit of it excavated. You don't get that type of building development from hunter-gatherers. I could be wrong but that wasn't what my previous impressions where.

These are the kinds of things I have seen which gave me the impression this was just a transitional stage of Hunter gatherers on the way to civilization, not technically a civilization itself:

Last Stand of the Hunter-Gatherers? - Archaeology Magazine

The 11,000-year-old stone circles of Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey may have been monuments to a vanishing way of life

www.archaeology.org

 

[Fishking]

These are the kinds of things I have seen which gave me the impression this was just a transitional stage of Hunter gatherers on the way to civilization, not technically a civilization itself:

Last Stand of the Hunter-Gatherers? - Archaeology Magazine

The 11,000-year-old stone circles of Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey may have been monuments to a vanishing way of life

www.archaeology.org

Btw...you might like this YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast

 

[PoS]

Btw...you might like this YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast

That's a good one. The podcasts are really long, but theyre well researched and very thorough.

 

[Fishking]

That's a good one. The podcasts are really long, but theyre well researched and very thorough.

Yup....long but good for communiting.

 

[HK.227]

Nah, runes were a way of writing, it was a way to record. The runes are an adaptation of a writing system, they seem to basically been ripped from various alphabets, mainly the Greek and Alpine alphabets, so the inventors probably were people who had travelled and learned foreign alphabets and decided to use them for Germanic languages.

It certainly seems to be the case for most civilisations, but the later waves of Indo-European migrants had a quite less pragmatic view of the world than most.
One thing we can be sure of is that the mystical connotations of the runes are well attested, if only poorly understood. But it does fit perfectly. Everything had mystical meaning to them, from animal herding to architecture, to the building of boats and sowing of oats. You couldn't even pick a berry for medicine without first having to recite some hymn or other.

Regarding the runes, one thing that is certainly impossible to ignore, is how each letter is tied to something in the contemporary understanding of the natural world. In this futhark mirrors the Irish Bardic alphabet which is thought to have been adapted from the lost Druidic alphabet. Also, both druidic and runic could be written with twigs from sacred trees, while the Roman and Greeks alphabets could not. The Druidic alphabet is believed to be from at least 300 BC, whereas the Germanic tribes didn't really interact much with the Romans until after the conquest of Gaul, so my money is on them "culturally appropriating" the runes from the Celts like so many other things. However, I certainly suspect that mundane writing on permanent mediums such as paper and stone can be attributed to inspiration from the Greeks and Romans. They certainly started writing their names in Futhark on everything after that happened, whereas before that sort of thing just wasn't done. Weapons, combs, belt buckles, Stones. Maybe a cultural taboo of some kind, considering "rune" means "secret", that eventually died out.

 

[joluoto]

It certainly seems to be the case for most civilisations, but the later waves of Indo-European migrants had a quite less pragmatic view of the world than most.
One thing we can be sure of is that the mystical connotations of the runes are well attested, if only poorly understood. But it does fit perfectly. Everything had mystical meaning to them, from animal herding to architecture, to the building of boats and sowing of oats. You couldn't even pick a berry for medicine without first having to recite some hymn or other.

Regarding the runes, one thing that is certainly impossible to ignore, is how each letter is tied to something in the contemporary understanding of the natural world. In this futhark mirrors the Irish Bardic alphabet which is thought to have been adapted from the lost Druidic alphabet. Also, both druidic and runic could be written with twigs from sacred trees, while the Roman and Greeks alphabets could not. The Druidic alphabet is believed to be from at least 300 BC, whereas the Germanic tribes didn't really interact much with the Romans until after the conquest of Gaul, so my money is on them "culturally appropriating" the runes from the Celts like so many other things. However, I certainly suspect that mundane writing on permanent mediums such as paper and stone can be attributed to inspiration from the Greeks and Romans. They certainly started writing their names in Futhark on everything after that happened, whereas before that sort of thing just wasn't done. Weapons, combs, belt buckles, Stones. Maybe a cultural taboo of some kind, considering "rune" means "secret", that eventually died out.

Many of the runes look very much like letters from Alpine alphabets, while other has uncanny resemblence to Greek letters. Most likley the runic script was created by Germanic travellers who had seen other alphabets and decided to create a writing system for their own language.

Jackson Crawford has a good video about it.

 

[Oozlefinch]

These are the kinds of things I have seen which gave me the impression this was just a transitional stage of Hunter gatherers on the way to civilization, not technically a civilization itself:

But from all evidence so far, it was built not by a "civilization, but by hunter-gatherers. Likely as a location where many groups would come together for various reasons. That my be religious, for trade, or many other things. And this is not unlike many of the American Indian tribes into the recent era. Still widely scattered nomadic groups, simply returning to the same location over and over again.

As such, it would not be a "civilization", simply a location that multiple groups came together in. A step in the right direction, but not there yet.

One of the fascinating things about looking at pre-Columbian America is that we can see such examples much closer. As the Indians remained in a Neolithic state for many thousands of years longer, many anthropologists look to them to try and interpret what has been found more recently. And to me, Göbekli Tepe brings to mind the Mississippian Culture. Once again, largely multiple groups that started to work together, at the same time that agriculture started to spread in the area. Even building edifices and large structures.

But it was not a "civilization", simply a kind of confederation of dozens of different tribal groups. And only lasted a few hundred years before imploding and the various tribes scattering again. Hence, why it is called a "culture", and not a "civilization". Even though they had built large structures, trade routs, and the starts of cities it did not last, never unified, and soon dissolved again.