Scientific American online has a blog with an article entitled, “Doomsday: Not As Much Fun As You’d Think”. It’s interesting in that it points out the difficulties of rebuilding a destroyed civilization. Particularly, that the first generation would be too occupied with survival to teach the next generation to read. Once that chain of literacy was broken, written language would have to be re-invented.
The more I learn about our past, the more I am convinced that a previous advanced civilization existed, perhaps more advanced than our present civilization, and was wiped out by some disaster. In short, when it comes to post apocolyptic eras, we are presently living in one.
In 1910, Peter Freuchen, “married” a Greenlandic Eskimo and lived with them for some time. He later recounted his experiences in a book entitled, “The Book of the Eskimos”.
At the time the Eskimos did not have a system of writing. They did have an extremely explicit oral language which they used to pass down information from generation to generation. A village would have an individual called an angokok, the Eskimo equivalent of a shaman. The angokok had the job of memorizing and passing down this knowledge and interfacing with spirits on behalf of the village.
Peter Freuchen documents aspects of the stories they’ve passed down that date back some 30,000 years, and accurate descriptions of animals like the woolly mammoth and saber toothed tiger. These legends also documented a time when people traveled about in flying houses.
When Admiral Perry made his attempt to reach the geographical north pole (whether he did is still a subject of debate, many are doubtful that his account can be accurate), he took back to New York a couple of Eskimo guides that had accompanied him on part of the journey. When they returned, they referred to the early cars of the time as people moving about in rolling houses.
The similarity of the description of cars as rolling houses to the description of an earlier time when people moved about in flying houses suggests that they were describing some kind of flying vehicle.
Another aspect of this that intrigues me, at the time when people moved about in flying houses, the angokok’s also believed that words had great power. Things could be made to happen by speaking them, but words lost their power with use and so angokok’s would invent new words for everything so that they would again have power.
Ancient Indian Vedic texts describe vimanas which are flying machines. Some of these descriptions resemble airplanes, others more like a flying saucer.
I had seen photographs of old Mesopotamian batteries, or more correctly, cells. Clay-pot devices, not indicative of a very advanced technology. I had heard of ancient Egyptian batteries and had expected something quite the same.
Instead I saw something that was comparable to a modern flashlight cell. If you remember the lantern batteries that used to be longer than the current generation with two screw posts on top, internally they were comprised of four F cells. F cells resemble long D cells.
The Egyptian cell had a strong resemblance to the internal F cells in the older style lantern batteries. Like a modern day cell, it had a carbon positive electrode and a zinc negative electrode. I don’t know what they used for an electrolyte, but the top was sealed with a tar just as are modern cells.
The symmetry and precision of the electrodes was impressive suggesting that the ancient Egyptians possessed machining capabilities that were relatively advanced.
Similarities in the early Chinese written language and ancient Egyptian suggested a common precursor language.
Legends of Lemuria or Mu, and then later Atlantis, describe advanced ancient civilizations. Lemuria was not advanced technologically but spiritually or psychically, Atlantis was scientifically and technologically advanced. But both continents sank, or so goes the legends.
You find many different cultures with stories of prior advanced civilization, advanced either technologically or spiritually, followed by world-wide flood myths.
This suggests that we’re not the first, we’re living in a post apocolyptic era. Many suggest that the flood myths relates to floods caused by the melting of the last ice age, but such melting would have been less sudden.
I suspect a deep ocean impact event. That is, an asteroid impact somewhere over deep ocean displacing a huge amount of water into the atmosphere, and even past the atmosphere out into near space, initially much of it as vapor or supercritical water, which then is attracted back by gravity, condenses and rains out around the planet.
I am of the belief that not only did a previous civilization exist, but that it was global (at least) in scale, and both more technologically and spiritually advanced than we are today. Nearly all traces of this civilization save for some stories passed down via oral tradition and a handful of monuments so large and robust that they survived, were erased.
I believed this probably happened approximately 12000 BC, and that for the next 6000 or so years, all knowledge was passed orally and it wasn’t until about 6000 years later, when early Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and Arabs had invented writing and recorded some of the oral stories in writing.
If this happened to mankind before, it can, and given enough time will, happen again. I think there are a couple of lessons in this. First, we should prepare for such an event so that some continuity of civilization can survive. In particular knowledge should be stored and encoded in such as way that a civilization having to re-invent written language again could understand it and make use of it. We should also establish self-sufficient colonies on the moon and later Mars. Colonies that are capable of living off the land.
