jarednjames said:Some think they were built by aliens. 'Nuff said.
Classic human trait there: If you don't know it and can't work it out, 'fill in the blanks' yourself.
Pengwuino said:You should watch Idiocracy.
Hilarious and based on a true story.
My point was that it would be an oral history, which was common, if only by storytellers, I'd think something so labor intensive would have a story passed down and was curious as to the reasons it would have vanished, but as has been said, it could be religious, political, or societal breakdowns.Grep said:I suppose in a society where paper (or whatever) is very expensive, you would only write things you think are very important. And the chances of it lasting thousands of years is pretty remote unless it's deemed important enough to copy and preserve. Or you like carving on rock.
Literacy rates must have been terrible. I bet people wouldn't generally bother to write things down that everyone already knew, or which was common knowledge at the time. Things like Stonehenge and the pyramids seem to be exactly in that category, to me.
Evo said:My point was that it would be an oral history, which was common, if only by storytellers, I'd think something so labor intensive would have a story passed down and was curious as to the reasons it would have vanished, but as has been said, it could be religious, political, or societal breakdowns.
DavidSnider said:
Evo said:My point was that it would be an oral history, which was common, if only by storytellers, I'd think something so labor intensive would have a story passed down and was curious as to the reasons it would have vanished, but as has been said, it could be religious, political, or societal breakdowns.
What mysteries are you referring to? Why they were built, or how they were built? Neither are really mysteries. Mankind has continually built large edifices, from Egyptian to Greek to Roman to Mayan to European to American to Malaysian to Chinese to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And lots in between. There's no mystery as to why any of these structures were built. And, any mystery wrt how ancient massive structures were built has been resolved by investigating how they might be built using man and animal power and then calculating how much man and animal power would be necessary to build them. It turns out that the necessary resources were well within the means of ancient civilizations. Hence, no mysteries there.Evo said:I've always wondered about how thing like the pyramids, the sphynx, stonehenge, etc... become mysteries although the area has supposedly been continually occupied since their creation. I mean in every generation aren't these things odd enough that someone would ask "what is that and where did that come from" so that the knowledge would never be lost?
I can understand ancient ruins in Peru where the people left and the jungle swallowed the buildings so that they vanished from memory, but these others, how is that possible?
The info was rediscovered by archaeologists, the people living there had forgotten.ThomasT said:What mysteries are you referring to? Why they were built, or how they were built? Neither are really mysteries. Mankind has continually built large edifices, from Egyptian to Greek to Roman to Mayan to European to American to Malaysian to Chinese to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And lots in between. There's no mystery as to why any of these structures were built. And, any mystery wrt how ancient massive structures were built has been resolved by investigating how they might be built using man and animal power and then calculating how much man and animal power would be necessary to build them. It turns out that the necessary resources were well within the means of ancient civilizations. Hence, no mysteries there.
As to how the specific details of, ie. the info regarding, the building of ancient massive structures got lost -- that really doesn't seem too mysterious. And what other posters said.
Just a thought. Might a more mysterious consideration involve how information gets found?
"Most people are not at all interested in the death of languages," he says. "If we are not cautious about the way English is progressing it may eventually kill most other languages."
...
133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people
jarednjames said:Stone henge is something of a one off affair, so once you've done it there's really no need to maintain the knowledge.
Now, we can keep knowledge easily. Store it away for future reference. Back then, if it wasn't taught it wasn't remembered. So if there's no need to remember it (we're not planning another stone henge) there's no need to waste time teaching it. The mythical stories cover that area.
AlephZero said:Hmmm - isn't the point that Stonehenge was most likely built to serve some purpose over a fairly long timescale (and not just for the purpose of amusing future archeologists!), therefore the question is not so much "how was it built" but "how it was used". Considering some of the much simpler solstice-marking devices that were built at different locations within Britain, Occam's razor would suggests it was for more than just looking at the sunrise on one or two days each year. But we don't have the user manual any more.
Like I said, once you've built it (whether for long or short term use) you don't need that specific knowledge again unless you plan on repeating it. The use of something has little to do with the knowledge required to build it, if any.
The 'architect' and constructors of stone henge may have been the only ones with the knowledge how to do so. Once they die, that knowledge is gone. Many people may have known about it's use so it remains. However, uses evolve over time and so information is subject to change with it.
Actually, the reverse is not true. Stone inscriptions and paper records have survived for centuries and even millenia. Much information about the 20th century history of computing is already irretrievably lost, either because it was only stored on materials with a short life, or because there is no longer any technology to read it, or even to read the instructions for re-creating the technology.
The fact is that in 2011, we have a far more complete knowledge of the thought processes of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Newton, etc, from their surviving writings, than we do about the early pioneers of electronic computing. This does not necessarily seem like "progress" to me.
Well that all comes down to what you consider the progress to be. You pick a very specific example, but the fact is we only have records from the past of very specific people. There is little recorded about joe blogs down the road and his random experiments in his garden shed. But now, you only have to be in the internet and you could find all about it.
My point being, we have a lot of information stored now about a multitude of things, where as previously there was only a few records from rather specific subjects.
http://www.examiner.com/ancient-may...vent-of-july-12-1652?do_not_mobile_redirect=1examiner.com said:The infamous Maya “book burning” of July 12, 1652 marks a very sad date in the history of the Yucatan Maya under Spanish rule. The Catholic*Friar Diego de Landa ordered the burning of some reported 5,000 idols and 27 hieroglyphic scrolls, stating that they contained the work of the devil and prevented them from learning/accepting Christianity. Landa could not read the scrolls, but he assumed that they were full of witchcraft and evil knowledge. Landa*might*not known what was in the scrolls, but he did notice the reaction of the Maya while they burned:
"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
This is such an atrocity, the stupidty is beyone belief. This has always upset me. Destroying knowledge, some rulers hoped to make people think all knowledge started under their rule. The religious wanted no knowledge that was not published by them.EnumaElish said:I imagine records about the pyramids could have been lost when the ancient library of Alexandria burned down. Then there were things like book burnings and buried (or burned) scholars, for example by ancient Chinese dynasties, to ensure that history before the current dynasty had been erased, at least officially.
http://history.cultural-china.com/en/34History2954.html
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning?wasRedirected=true
Another instance of libraricide is record-burning by the conquerors, as in the burning of Mayan records:
http://www.examiner.com/ancient-may...vent-of-july-12-1652?do_not_mobile_redirect=1