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Mysterious Prehistoric Sites And Why Written Language Gets Us Respect
I just tossed in that last--the article doesn't explain anything about the languages. But this little article over at Listverse does what all good inspiration should do--it takes you somewhere else.
Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. We have no Rosetta Stone for the neolithic age--we can't read the symbols we have found. A vast swath of ancient people across the world are silent. We don't know who they were, what they valued, or what they would want us to know about the times they lived through.
If we're lucky, we have artifacts. If we're really lucky, they haven't been hopelessly jumbled into a discordant song no one can sing. We can examine things where we find them, and try to understand the story they tell us.
Here are ten places to ponder. Some are stone circles, some henges, some settlements...some may be tombs. They may have been temples or calendars or even the annual social hall. A few of these places still see visitors--curious tourists, working scientists, spiritual pagans, and maybe even the Fair Folk.
The builders weren't aliens, for heaven's sake--they had our brains. Some were visionaries, some scientists (in that they looked at what was actually there, and worked their way through the evidence.) Skara Brae had drainage and toilets! They measured the skies in ways we lost, taking thousands of years to return to that knowledge. They impacted their world.
No, it's not a pyramid. They worked with the materials they had. But we should respect their solutions, and know that we are an incredible species, in our thinking and our doing.
Take a look.
Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. We have no Rosetta Stone for the neolithic age--we can't read the symbols we have found. A vast swath of ancient people across the world are silent. We don't know who they were, what they valued, or what they would want us to know about the times they lived through.
If we're lucky, we have artifacts. If we're really lucky, they haven't been hopelessly jumbled into a discordant song no one can sing. We can examine things where we find them, and try to understand the story they tell us.
Here are ten places to ponder. Some are stone circles, some henges, some settlements...some may be tombs. They may have been temples or calendars or even the annual social hall. A few of these places still see visitors--curious tourists, working scientists, spiritual pagans, and maybe even the Fair Folk.
The builders weren't aliens, for heaven's sake--they had our brains. Some were visionaries, some scientists (in that they looked at what was actually there, and worked their way through the evidence.) Skara Brae had drainage and toilets! They measured the skies in ways we lost, taking thousands of years to return to that knowledge. They impacted their world.
No, it's not a pyramid. They worked with the materials they had. But we should respect their solutions, and know that we are an incredible species, in our thinking and our doing.
Take a look.
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Allie would have had quite an adventure there!
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But, yeah. I think of how often the lives of European peasants were portrayed as nasty, brutal and short - but I read a bunch of accounts of the legal entanglements of English villagers, and OMG, more litiginous than we are, and that's really saying something. Though I guess before TV you had to do something to pass the time, and lawsuits and counter lawsuits against your neighbor whiled away the long winter nights...? Certainly not people lacking in wit, anyway.
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*Hope* we still have antibiotics, the way doctors have misused them.