Aquaman & Science/Mythologies: Do You Feel Ancient Cultures were more advanced than we are today?

Zoness said:

By the time the Romans controlled Egypt (~30 BCE), they were already more than 2,000 years old! We tend to think of the Romans as ancient, but there was as much time between us and the Romans as there was between the Romans and the building of the Pyramids. In fact a bit more, to the latter. Even back then, the Romans only had a vague idea about who actually built them. I just think that's cool as heck.

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I think this is one of my favorite little historical quirks--that the same fascination we hold towards Ancient Egypt, the Greeks and Romans also held towards them 2000 years ago. The same awe, the same sense of mystery and antiquity. Egypt has been in the collective imagination like that for so long, that shared sense of intrigue is a neat bit of common ground between us and the classical world.

I got to visit Mycenae this past September, which was also pretty cool. The classical Greeks came up with stories about cyclops because they couldn't figure out how normal sized humans could build with those massive stones. All that Bronze Age stuff is really interesting.

Zoness said:

ONE OF US! ONE OF US! You can even sprinkle in some Hellenism if that's up your alley, like I've considered lately.

I'm really into ancient cultures right now, especially those that built historical megastructures because they're just so cool to me, especially Petra and Angkor Wat. I'm mostly a philosophical naturalist because I don't feel that I've seen any evidence to the contrary. However, I'm totally down if we discover something like what you've said or some sort of mana or magic power too that connects us to such things. While were at it, toss in a working FTL system too!

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My visit to Crete last January pretty much made me fall in love with Minoan spirituality and the bronze age. Seeing the snake priestess statue in Heraklion's museum was actually one of the most spiritual experiences of my life so far.

Jane_the_Bane said:

Seeing the snake priestess statue in Heraklion's museum was actually one of the most spiritual experiences of my life so far.

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I do learn a lot here. I've not known about the Snake Priestess statue. So I googled her. How fortunate for you to visit that museum, and with a spiritual high as part of the memories.

Jane_the_Bane said:

My visit to Crete last January pretty much made me fall in love with Minoan spirituality and the bronze age. Seeing the snake priestess statue in Heraklion's museum was actually one of the most spiritual experiences of my life so far.

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That sounds like an amazing experience actually. I'd love to go to Greece, including Crete someday. Right now flights are just super expensive and I'm actually flying to Barbados in February but someday I will go and take it all in. Thanks for sharing that experience!

I am not such a big fan of post- minoan Hellenic cultures. Classic Athenians treated their wives like the Taliban and thought it perfectly normal for men to sexually abuse boys as a kind of "tuition fee", the Spartans were brutal proto-fascists, and the whole culture demoted goddesses to mere spouses.
I still like them a lot better than the Romans, but still...

Jane_the_Bane said:

I am not such a big fan of post- minoan Hellenic cultures. Classic Athenians treated their wives like the Taliban and thought it perfectly normal for men to sexually abuse boys as a kind of "tuition fee", the Spartans were brutal proto-fascists, and the whole culture demoted goddesses to mere spouses.
I still like them a lot better than the Romans, but still...

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I've only recently gained any interest in antiquity and have slowly been learning about those cultures and there's parts I like but a lot of unpleasantness too. I think there's a tendency to romanticize antiquity though.

Jane_the_Bane said:

I am not such a big fan of post- minoan Hellenic cultures. Classic Athenians treated their wives like the Taliban and thought it perfectly normal for men to sexually abuse boys as a kind of "tuition fee", the Spartans were brutal proto-fascists, and the whole culture demoted goddesses to mere spouses.

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Artemis. Athena. Hestia. Aphrodite is technically married, but that never stops her from doing whatever she wants. And there's still more than a bit of a premordial mother goddess in Gaia.

I find the Doric Age pretty interesting, what with it being a Dark Age in which everyone is romanticizing a golden past. And then the Hellenistic fusion! Granted, I'm intrigued by Egypt in just about any iteration, Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman...

Zoness said:

I've only recently gained any interest in antiquity and have slowly been learning about those cultures and there's parts I like but a lot of unpleasantness too. I think there's a tendency to romanticize antiquity though.

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On the plus side, they didn't come up with capitalism and collapse into corporatocracy...

Silmarien said:

On the plus side, they didn't come up with capitalism and collapse into corporatocracy...

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Oof truer words never have been spoken.

Still these periods are very interesting to me. Hellenism and it's various fusions in the ancient world are fascinating. Assassin's Creed Origins explores Ptolemaic Egypt in great depth and Odyssey takes place during the lifetime of Socrates I'm hype to play both games.

Athena and Hermes have always been gods that I've had an affinity for. I enjoy seeing the Hellenic aesthetics and symbols incorporated throughout history, especially in architecture. Apparently Nashville has a giant replica Pantheon that I'd like to visit someday.

All cultures are more heterogeneous than we usually assume, even when we are not talking about stretches of time that span centuries or millennia. But this does not fit so well into the conventions of story-telling that almost inevitably creep into historiography: we want clear-cut narratives; heroes, villains, singular chains of events that lead in a relatively straight line from a to b. It was almost never as simple as that.

I love Athena, for example, yet her most well-known originmyth sees Zeus turning her female "in vitro" in order to eliminate a potential rival and avoid the fate of his father and grandfather. It was apparently inconceivable that a goddess could ever hope to challenge a god, even if her portfolio consisted of wisdom and warfare. (I actually sketched a short story around this, where Athena fulfills the prophecy and topples her father's reign to save her mother Metis).

Anatomically modern humans are assumed to have existed for the last 200000-150000 years, yet Civilisation (depending how you define the term) for about 6000. How do you account for this discrepancy?

I am reminded of a Greek writer (I think Thucydides, but I am speaking under correction) who said that posterity will think Athens 1000 times greater than it really was, and Sparta 1000 times less - simply because the one builds grandiose monuments and puffs itself up, and the other built nothing and acted more laconically about their accomplishments. Today, you visit Athens and see the Parthenon, but few traipse down the Eutotas valley to see the void that was the greatness of Sparta.

You read about all the great achievements of Roman Emperors or ancient Kings, but often almost nothing remains: "I am the great Ozymandias, look upon my works ye mighty and despair."

A lot doesn't survive. Often it is merely coincidence it does. Whole unknown civilisations suddenly appear out of nowhere, like the Indus Valley, or Maya, that no one knew existed; or was only vaguely known of, and previously doubted if real, like the Minoans, Mycenaeans or Hitittes.

A society that built mostly in perishable wood or such, or did not have a monumental culture (such as Sparta) will leave almost no remains at all. Without literary sources, we wouldn't know they existed at all. Never underestimate the actual paucity of remains - whole battlefields and known cities of Roman times are simply not found today. Pompeii is the exception, not the rule.

So what of that long period before Civilisation as we know it? What cultures were there? Or are we assuming human intelligence and high thought is a modern thing, a recent trend - almost the Anthroposophic belief in progressive expansion of the mind? If high technology or art did occur, it might just have passed away, as we have no idea what materials they may not have used. What do we mean by 'high technology' anyway? Hellenistic science could have built steam engines, they just seldom did nor utilised it widely, so no remains of this survives outside literary sources. Just because we use so much plastic, doesn't mean one has to, nor can we say it needs to be the case. Sure, we have no evidence of it, but evidence is a tricky thing and depends on the paradigm applied to it. Who knows what might not appear? We have myths of sunken cities and stories of lost discoveries (like Z in the Kalahari), and while we discount them, it would be salutary to remember they did the same to Troy and Sumer.

Silmarien said:

I find the Doric Age pretty interesting, what with it being a Dark Age in which everyone is romanticizing a golden past. And then the Hellenistic fusion! Granted, I'm intrigued by Egypt in just about any iteration, Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman...

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The Greek Dark Age is actually a major problem with our current timelines. No Greek author supports its existence, as they had the Heroic Age of Mycenae end, followed by Archaic times. To them, Troy was just a few generations ago, not 400 years. So we have to assume the Greeks have a major change, where a sense of the past emerges suddenly about the time of the first Olympiad, and prior to this they saw history in a vague legendary way (akin to Ferdowsi or the aboriginal Dreamtime, or popular ideas of the Middle Ages, where multiple times are all telescoped together). The sheer lack of finds for this period (Lefkandi and Geometric ware notwithstanding), with the sudden disappearance of Mycenean sites and colonies, a gap, and then their archaic reappearance, seems highly suspect. It is a major problem, even with a Bronze Age collapse and Dorian invasion. It seems too total.

Schliemann found the tombs at Mycenae by using Pausanias' account, after all. The major reason we date Mycenae as we do, is based on Egyptian wares and near-contemporaneaty with Hittites. This is part of why people like Rohl or Velikovsky doubt the Egyptian timelines as based on Champollion. One of the strengths of the New Chronology of Rohl is the eradication of the Greek Dark Age (though it has other significant problems, too). Regardless, I can't shake the feeling when reading the archaeology here with the ancient accounts, that something is seriously off here.

Zoness said:

A very interesting subject is the idea of a Great Filter which is "something" (as in, we're not sure what it is) that limits species from becoming space-faring or sufficiently advanced to explore the universe before getting wiped out. For all we know, the universe might be littered with such species with massive, ruined civilizations just waiting to be explored.

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Yeah, I think I first learned about this subject watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Might be a combination of evolution producing intelligent beings being a rarity and the difficulty and expense space travel requires. The gap between being a space faring species and having access to doomsday devices far too wide. Although, I would suspect the gap between developing artificial intelligence and having doomsday weapons to be much smaller. The universe might be littered with "civilizations" but of the artificial intelligence kind. If they would even have a need for that kind of thing.

By the time the Romans controlled Egypt (~30 BCE), they were already more than 2,000 years old! We tend to think of the Romans as ancient, but there was as much time between us and the Romans as there was between the Romans and the building of the Pyramids. In fact a bit more, to the latter. Even back then, the Romans only had a vague idea about who actually built them. I just think that's cool as heck.

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Really? I had no idea. Wonder if they had their own "Aliens" guy.. instead he was a "Gods" guy. Although he'd probably be viewed as less crazy back then, lol.

Given how vast the universe is and how long it takes for lightwaves to travel from one system to the next(with lightspeed being the fastest thing in the cosmos), it is literally impossible for us to detect traces of extraterrestrial civilizations contemporaneous to ourselves. (Unless they were in our immediate vicinity.)
Think about it: when we study stars at the other end of our own galaxy, we are looking at light that started its journey when modern homo sapiens wasn't around.

Zoness said:

A very interesting subject is the idea of a Great Filter which is "something" (as in, we're not sure what it is) that limits species from becoming space-faring or sufficiently advanced to explore the universe before getting wiped out.

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Cynical me would wager that sufficient technological advancement almost inevitably leads to the environmental exploitation, destruction and eventual collapse that's currently starting to becomenoticeable in our world.
We are smart enough to split atoms, modify genes, and slingshot spacecraft to nearby planets, but not smart enough to react to a global, cataclysmic catastrophe of our own making. Heck, most Americans' response to too much air conditioning probably STILL consists of opening the window (while letting the AC continue at full blast).

Recovering information from a long lost hyper-advanced earth civilization is possible under the following conditions:

1. The civilization broadcasted information about itself into space ala the Arecibo message.
2. A data mirror exists at a distance in light years of greater than or equal to twice the years elapsed since the lost civilization sent their original message, and "bounced back" the message in our direction.
3. We know where and when to point our telescope / satellite to catch the return message.

What kind of mirror? Could be a literal mirror i.e., light reflector but this is suboptimal. Better to be a digital transmitter.

Why would a distant civilization bother constructing this data mirror when it has no obvious practical benefit to itself, cannot be used for effective communication, and really only serves as a book-keeping win for other civilizations they will never meet? I'll leave all that to one side.

That an earth civilization achieved this level of technology and left no as-yet discovered physical evidence seems very unlikely considering several independent lines of evidence. But if conditions 1-3 are met we should in principal be able to recover info about this lost civilization.

There are moral implications to this hypothetical scenario. Is SETI morally obligated to send back a hypothetical message it receives? Should we be sending more Arecibo style messages?