it's always good to remember that the ancients were the same as us in many ways. They were all just people. The human mind has changed very little over the last 10,000 years-- all of recorded history essentially
@@duolingoowl920 thank you for that beautiful truth. We sometimes remember ancient civilizations for the big things they built or how long they lasted or the history or armies. But we forget that there were peoples, and children and families and they had memories and maybe even hobbies and occasionally, maybe the poor lower class families still had time to play the fute on the roof or backyard of their small home. they were people.
Just imagine... there is almost a 3,000-year gap between the first unified Egyptian dynasty and the last. That's 1,000 years more than the gap between the last Egyptian dynasty and our time!
Just remember, eastern rome or the byzantine empire was still around a few hundred years ago. The minoans on crete on the other had a lively trade network especially trading olive oil with objects from as far away as asia being found when rome was just a bunch of villages. The hittites who lived in modern turkey forged iron and traded with egypt before the rise of greece. Babylon and Uruk were cities in a time when world population was so low you could travel for months without finding another proper settlement.
Imagine a Roman collector of artefacts going to Egypt in 30 BC. The wars are finished, pax rules, the seas are free and open, and our Roman can try and buy things that are 1000 yrs older than the gap between us and the Romans.
Just think, Australia's First Nations societies existed 50,000 years before ancient Egypt. Not 5,000... 50,000 YEARS MIND BLOWING EDIT. If this comment bothers you, then ask yourself why. See below... or don't and save yourself the bother. Note that it is a comment about the perception of time. Let's see what bothers people the most about it.
Realistically it's less because a succession of foreign powers invaded, occupied and ruled Egypt for centuries before the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
There were archeologists in ancient times, which is honestly just mind-blowing but simultaneously unsurprising because some people have always been driven with the curiosity of our collective history
The key is to have a civilization progressed enough meeting the needs of people that they can specialize and do something other than gathering food or hunting.
Do you think a people who built monumental structures with astronomical precision hadn't figured everything else out? That's one of the reasons the structures were built in the first place. Black people were telling the future generations that there is nothing new under the sun. What socalled nonblack people refuse to accept as a collective is the fact that their ancestors lied about everything due to demonic savage antiBlack racism. I write as an Israelite and an historian who has had the privilege to study history from primary. World history is Black history. This explains why mainstream history is never read from primary sources. As an educator I tell students to never trust history out of the mouths of others. Ask them to cite from primary sources. Descriptions of famous people are readily available from primary sources. Lastly, if you want to know how long we have been around ask an Israelite. This is because socalled nonblack people have no access to deep memory because they are hybrids who suddenly appeared six to ten thousand years ago according to science and actual history. Shalom
@@Ed-ym4tu - religion or warfare follows - extra bodies that are not needed for food are first used for religion, warfare or other? These extra bodies push a way of life that was around for a very very very very very very long time onto this conveyor belt that moves faster the longer we are on it. 300,000 plus years of doing the same things - 10,000 years when change started maybe a bit longer and we are now flying into space.
warfare is not caused by extra bodies that have something to do other than produce food. Warfare is caused by people realizing it's easier to let other people produce food, and then take it by force.
Fun fact: There are two Bronze Age prince's graves in my area (Leubingen and Helmsdorf in central Germany) that contained very similar grave goods. Some golden jewelry and weapons, a special stone that was associated with bronze making, some ceramic vessels and... * _drumroll_ * ...a stone axe from the Stone Age. The stone axes were both more than a thousand years older than the graves. The hypothesis is that those ancient axes were used to legitimate the "old" right to rule for the respective prince.
I believe those graves belong to the Unetice Culture, if I'm remembering correctly! It's my favorite part of Bronze Age Europe. Haven't read about the Unetice in a while but there's some excellent work being done on it. You're lucky that you get to live so close to two such fascinating sites!
@@TheFallofRome Correct, they are Únětice culture. I don't have a car, so all those sites are still unreachable for me. They are usually not serviced by public transport. ^ ^ But yes - my region has a buttload of history. From Neanderthals who butchered a 4m high elephant*, over a mesolithic shaman**, over the Sky Disk of Nebra°, to the bones of Queen Editha°°... All pretty sensational finds here in the region. And that's just the outstanding ones - there are so many more. Pömmelte, for example, which is a Bronze Age woodhenge with an extensive settlement around it. * Neumark-Nord 1 (ok, not quite as spectacular as the Schönigen spears) ** the "Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg" ° also from the Únětice culture °° 10th century queen, wife of first Holy Roman Emperor Otto I., whose bones have been discovered in the Magdeburg cathedral
Thuringia and Saxony were THE tin sources of the old Bronze Age... the deplation of those sources probably caused the civilization break in the mediterran region.
Ennigaldi: "Dad, let's burry the ruins so people with better technology can learn more" Nabonidus: "Brilliant!" Modern people: "We don't know where the capital was"
Modern archeologists: "Thank god we don't know where the capital was. So people with better technology can learn more without destroying the context by digging everything up."
@@merrittanimation7721”This city will last for ten thousand years! Of course we will be able to track this down later!” *The city fell ten years later*
Sumer, the oldest of the Mesopotamian civilizations, was so ancient, it had been forgotten even by ancient times and was a surprise when the archaeologists discovered it
@@MichaelLeBlanc-p4f Let's hope we thrive a while longer, and that our remnants could be made intelligible by future generations. All our digital past is now compromised by being in media and languages that we are rapidly losing. How many important docs still lie on floppy disks or old hard drives? Oh well, that's a problem for the future to solve
The Romans would also view the Spartans as very respectable people. They’d have tours of Sparta and had a similar romanticized view of them that we have now
@@tylerreigner3627Really? That's surprising considering how pathetic the (non-mythological) Spartans were, especially by the time the Romans invaded Corinth.
@@coloradoing9172Funny thing about sparta, they were pathetic in the grand scheme of things but theyre really good at what modern people would call marketing. Sparta past their prime practically become more of a "warrior disneyland"(exaggerating here, but I mean, kindda what happened)
_From Cyrus to Alexander_ begins thus: > When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old. More significant, the world knew its antiquity. that whole first page is one of my favorite book openings
One of my favorite facts about Ancient Egypt is that they had their own scholars who researched Ancient Egypt. Cleopatra lived closer to the modern day than to the building of the pyramids. When the Pyramid of Djoser was being built during the Third Dynasty, Gobekli Tepe was around twice as old to them than that pyramid is to us. At the founding of the First Dynasty, the Predynastic Egyptians had been around for over 3000 years before that, and the Nile Valley is known to have been inhabited by humans and archaic humans for between one million and two million years.
Yaaas! We've been around so long... and both forgotten and lost so much. We fight over how old the sphinx is, and even it's original state. Human history is absolutely fascinating.
I've read the first "civilisations" in Egypt are about 90.000 years old, then another 45.000. Of course on a small case, but it was first tries. From the french egyptologist Nicolas Grimal.
Yeah, its interesting to think about this. And the fact that the Nile shaped not just agriculture but also the political and social structures of Ancient Egypt
When the Spanish encountered the Incas and their amazing cities and stone work, the Spanish asked them how did they possibly build something so incredible and advanced. The Incas replied "this was here before us". And still today you can look at the Inca ruins and see their stone walls on top of a more advanced stone wall from a previous civilization. We think of ancient Egypt being ancient. But we are closer in time to the last Pharoah then the last Pharoah was to the building of the great pyramid of Egypt. So to the last Pharoah of Egypt "Cleopatra" the building of the great pyramid must have seemed very ancient.
I don't think the Inca built on earlier stuff. They reused earlier stuff but I don't think they built more stone on it. The difference in quality between the lower and higher layers is probably just the lower layers needing go be stronger and more perfect.
The Tiwanaku, the Wari, the Chavin, the Moche, the Paracas, the Chimú, the Huari and the Nazca. If you look at some photos of Inca ruins it looks like a 3 year old child putting Legos on top of an expert Lego builders build.
It's obvious something very interesting happened in South America. If something like Atlantis existed deep in the past, I think they either saw it or were influenced by it.
I'm starting to believe that the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza were much much older than Sumer. They might not even be the oldest evidence of extremely early civilizations, just the least weathered.
Peter Pringle has a YT channel. He does old songs on replicas of ancient instruments. He did the song of Gilgamesh, our oldest song. The song begins "In those days, in those ancient days, in those nights in those long ago nights, when the heavens and the earth were first parted, when men were established on the land, when the fires first burned in sacred shines...". Our oldest song recalls an even more ancient time. Wonderful.
Enjoyed the video very much. Excellent question! How does one define ancient? When do ancient times start? According to my daughter, it was around the time that I was born.
@@priyazu4000 Stuff was getting clogged with election related bots etc so I turned them off while I was away. I want to turn them all on again now that I'm back, but the settings arent' adjusting so it looks like I have to go through and manually do each video. I'll do it in chunks when I have time unless the general reset setting actually updates for me in YT studio
What fascinates me most on this topic is how some cultures managed to maintain at least partially, oral traditions going back to the lithic periods. I forget if it was mentioned in one of your videos or not, but there's one tribe in Canada that has oral historic memory of a memory of there being something akin to mammoths (memory of a memory). Likewise while not having ancient civilizations in how we think of them, Australian Aboriginals have oral traditions back to the lithic periods with mention of things that are most likely marsupial megafauna long gone. In regards to Greece, and keeping in mind how accurate Homer's Iliad is to the Mycenean era in regards to warfare and equipment, it leaves me wondering if classical Greek lost something in the translation to written language (or we lost the texts over centuries) preserving memories of the early settlement of the region or oral histories of the earlier faiths such as of the 'primordials' in hellenic mythos. Oral histories overall seem to be stronger at preserving incredibly old knowledge.
Frankly, I don't think that writing them down was as critical issue though definitely it makes for more inaccuracies as well but just how Greeks interacted with a lot more cultures and that means that their language chnaged more. And when it comes for preserving oral traditions it matters a lot as usually myths, stories were musical or at least quite melodic - it really just makes it easier to remember. Change language more often then story needs to adapt for the changes in speech, new melodies need to be created to fit new rythms etc.
Not sure how reliable those are. Nobody reads The Odyssey and assumes that the mythical creatures must be references to prehistoric megafauna, or that Paul Bunyan is a historical memory of Neanderthals.
I agree with you. I forgot where I saw it but I read about a conversation between a man and the god that gave the Egyptians writing (on a tomb wall, if I remember correctly) where the man stated that writing was killing memory. I thought that was a profound insight. I mean, look what "smart phones" are doing to us...
Check out "Edge of Memory" by Patrick Nunn. It's about exactly that, with plenty of cool examples dating back as far as 20,000 years (dated by identifying geological events of known age as being the subject of a myth)
@@thealkymyst crazy stuff back in the day. Dangerous animals being confused for supernatural forces. Legendary tales about everything. The inability to confirm or deny it make us think about something more which leads to the creation of religion.
@G.A.C_Preserve 🤣 when's the last time you mistook a bear for a dragon/giant snake? The ancients weren't dumb or they'd have died before reproducing & we'd not be here now to feel superior to them 😉
Your opening question immediately brought to mind Plato's reference to information about ancient civilizations' ideas about more ancient civilizations. He credited the story of Atlantis to an Egyptian priest's translation of an ancient temple inscription. In addition, Greek medical knowledge is attributed to Egypt. I hope you will be covering this at some point. Also, a long time ago, I was introduced to the theory that the Greeks encountered skeletal remains of mega-fauna and attributed them to their mostt ancient myths, especially the skull of one with a large hole being the source of the cyclops story.
A lot of Greek philosophy also comes from the Egyptian Mystery Schools. Many Greek philosophers lived as initiates in Egyptian temples for years and sometimes even decades to learn all their sciences (of the material and spiritual world), before establishing their own schools in Greece. Many of them even faced opposition from their own countrymen for trying to spread weird foreign knowledge in Greek lands.
The Aztec folklore says they came from a northern land known as as Aztlan into central Mexico with them viewing the classical Mesoamerican civilization as greater than themselves.
There’s an old Apache story I was told as a kid that says dogs brought death to the world. Given that Sirius is the Dog Star and the upper dryas impact would have appeared to come from Sirius to people who lived in the northern hemisphere. Also a pre Columbus story talks about white brothers that lost there way and follow a cross. Phoenician ships sails had the Red Cross later adopted by the Spanish. It also states that Cadiz in Spain (at least 3000 year old Phoenician settlement) was stated by the Roman to be the place where Phoenicians out fitted their largest ships for trade in far away lands. Cadiz is situated on the Atlantic. Why would Phoenicians who had ports in the Mediterranean need ports on the Atlantic?
In Kon Tiki, the author talks of Incan folktales that say pale skinned men with red hair settled on the northeen coast of modern day brazil (where ocean currents would have carried travelers from europe and north africa) and built stone cities. They were then pushed west until they reached the west coast of south america. The incans then say that they themselves conquered the last of the cities that these pale skinned men built, and used these cities as the foundation of their own empire. They go on to say that the pale skinned red haired people traveled west along ocean currents until they settled on the polynesian islands, such as easter island and beyond. The oral tradition of these islanders have a lot of similarities with eachother and the incan stories, however the islanders that were discovered by eurpeans were not the pale skinned islanders. The islanders discovered by europeans had replaced the first inhabitants in a series of bloody conquests that spanned many islands over thousands of miles. I don't know how accurate the author is, especially since he wrote his book in the 1930's, but if what he says is true, it opens the door to a pandora's box of untouched history
@@JRRGimli only euros believe this bs. Europe was under ice when the world was building cities. Euros feel stupid so they try and steal credit from the rest of the world.
@@JRRGimliThe story is false. There's no stone ruins of the Inca type in Eastern Brazil, neither is there any culture that stretches from there to the Andes. And you should be a bit skeptical of the pale skinned red haired giant stories. Alot of European story recorders of that era had a bad habit of reinterpreting native stories that vaguely mention brightness or colours into racial characteristics while some native stories are recent innovations from interactions with the outside world. I will say this, some Polynesians do have a narrative of coming from the East but we're certain most of them came from the West(Asia) and that most of the Islands were unsettled before them. We do have some evidence of people from the Americas making it to Polynesia maybe even before the Polynesians but those people are certainly of the same group as modern and pre-colonial native Andean peoples(from genetic testing).
Classical Greek understanding of Mycenaean Bronze Age civilization is very cool, I don't know if you cover it here because I haven't watched the video yet. This is a great idea to discuss!
Not here, no, but I'm going to do multiple versions of this, more or less. At least one will feature that topic. There's dozens of examples, if not hundreds, so one giant video would probably be impossible to produce
And in broad strokes, accurate, as intelligent DNA studies find. The Ancient Greeks attributed to themselves lots of blonde hair. Interesting that it virtually disappeared by admixture over time!
Some civilization was so old and mysterious, archaeologist still debates about its existence. The ancient text of Mahabharata mentioned kingdom of Krishna which sunk to the ocean, much like Indian's Atlantis. Others are less mythical but debatable like the Xia Dynasty, they knew it exist, but lack of historical records further complicates things. Now, imagine what these ancient civilizations thought about the civilizations before them, which also lost and forgotten? Truly a thought provoking ideas, I love this kind of content
I think it's quite clear that they've found and excavated the Xia. The only reason to deny it is because they didn't write it down, but civilizations are allowed to not have writing.
First time watcher here. I'm 2 minutes in and hooked. Looking forward to exploring this interesting question with the host. Our understanding of early civilizations are always evolving, but how well they knew about each other and the ones that came before is always going to be fun to explore.
HA! I've only read like 3/4...there's more that you don't see off to my left, it's a combination of mine and my wife's stuff. It's a long, ongoing process. Happy you found the video!!
@TheFallofRome loved this video and your presentation. I'm going to subscribe and check out more of your work. Would you consider a follow up video, that explores if any of the older ancient (bronze age) civilizations had any thoughts, understanding, stories of older civilization? what is the oldest civilization/s that we have enough knowledge about to describe their understanding of history? PS: I knew you really read those books! After I watch some more of your videos may I ask for recommendations?
@@jamesmasters2386 Sure thing--any topic you're interested in, just let me know. Just be aware that I did turn off comments during my several month-long break from YT so i'm working on turning them back on--you may have to come back here for a recommendation comment. I'm already writing a script for a follow up video
Learning cosmology makes it obvious yet impossible to really grasp. Learning history or archaeology makes it a smaller more digestible truth, but one that is far more personal. I adore both for simply allowing us to glimpse a slice of what was.
Hearing of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand's ignorance of the Assyrian Empire of only 200 years' earlier, I wonder if a troop of foreign soldiers finding themselves sent to Paris for some reason would have much awareness of Napoleon and his Empire.
You can find a lot of this in chinese historical writings. For example, the "Bamboo Annals" is a collection of ancient text written on bamboo scrolls buried in an ancient tomb (tomb of King Xiang of Wei, died 296 BC) discovered by people from Western Jin dynasty (281 AD). The actual bamboo scrolls have long gone so we can only read the copies written by the people from Western Jin dynasty, which started with an introduction of how they discovered the scrolls. It's fascinating to read that people back in Western Jin dynasty was baffled by the scrolls they found, mentioning the text was "really ancient" and they had to find professional scholar to decipher it. They also mentioned the text predates the Qin unification of China thus survived the book burning ordered by emperor Qin. We also get to know that before the invention of writing, people from the ancient past used ropes to remember stuff because someone from 2000+ years ago wrote that "our ancient ancestors from few thousand years ago used to use ropes for recording important events, they will tie a big knot for big event and smaller knot for smaller event". They also mentioned how "their ancestors" invented the first chinese characters, which was inspired by animal footsteps, and how they discovered fire (tribesmen from Suiren-shi noticed sparks were created when the birds pecking a type of wood, and they successfully created the first fire by doing the same on the wood) and even how they built their first house (someone from a tribe called Youchao-shi builds a hut on the tree using wooden sticks and leaves, and asked his tribesmen to move out from their caves and live on the trees with him). Most of the early history we now consider as mythological was actually historical record from even earlier ancient civilization collected and passed down to us by the civilization we consider ancient. It's really mind blowing to learn about something so specific and detailed which we can't even find from the archeological evidence.
I would love to see a video that covers all the rennaisance type events through history. Or times when information was lost and subsequently discovered again. Could be a fascinating topic.
The algorithm found me. I was listening to fall asleep...I WAS trying to sleep. Now I'm just listening. Fascinating. My general focus of ancient history has been mostly on south and central America, like who built machu picchu, and just how old and who were the olmecs... we've lost so much of our history. Thank you for videos like this! Cheers to what we can actually know.
This is quite a fascinating topic! I have usually heard a variant of this question in relation to the widely-circulated fact that Cleopatra is chronologically closer to the 21st century than the construction of the Pyramids. I look forward to watching the rest of the video! :)
Of course. When the Greek Herodotus was visiting and writing about Egypt, he referred to a society that was as far or farther in his past than his Greece was from our own day, even though he lived 25 centuries ago.
Myth building hasn't changed. Their is a legend of a giant turtle at a local pond. Everyone and their brother knows someone it saved as well as spotting it surfacing under a full moon. People even painted and built small rock effigies to the turtle when I was a kid.
Thank you for the very interesting video! It is fascinating how the Neo-Babylonian rulers harnessed restoration efforts to bolster their own claims to power. It makes one think of other politically-motivated restoration efforts, such as those of Mussolini's Fascist regime. It is good to have you back :)
This sounds like when the Peisistratos, the last Tyrant of Attica, invited the Sons Of Homer (the school of Oral Poetry supposedly founded by him) from Chios on Asia Minor to come to Athens (supposedly the last never-conquered city from the Mycenaen Period) and set the poems down in then-modern Greek script.
Gobekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. That we know of. For reference, Sumeria is about 6,000 years old. For all we know, Gobekli Tepe might have had ancient civilizations of their own. Our perspective on settled societies might be about to really broaden its scope in the next couple decades.
I think your conclusion is right on point. In the British Isles there are neolithic burial mounds with much later Roman burials as well. It seems fairly clear that the Romans believed these were sacred places appropriate for burying their own dead, even though they most likely had no clue who had built them originally.
If you step outside of archaeology and into textual evidence, I would suggest that the Assyrian King List fits in this category. Specifically the "kings who lived in tents" section of the list. Probably first written in the 14th century BCE, the king list was maintained and added to continuously into the 8th millennium BCE.
Have been here I think before you reached 10k so happy to see all your hard work paying off and about to reach 100k. Well done buddy. Well earned. And here is to 200k!
I'm so glad you're back, it's great to see you posting again. You're one of my favorite channels on TH-cam. I hope your life is going better and you're doing well.
im designing a ttrpg setting inspired by ancient history and 90s dungeoncrawler games and this video is so incredibly invaluable 😍 oh my gooood... it's so interesting about the greek idea of deteriorating ages and people getting smaller, that's really similar to the lore of dark souls, i haven't heard anyone mention that before.. great work 🥺✨
It's the exact opposite of dark souls, the game's totally and completely about infinitely repeating cycles, greeks were about a constant direction. Also you're not making a game, nice lies dumbass
1:15 thank you so very much for addressing that so swiftly and concisely. I would of had the hardest of times following along without a proper framework statement, such as the one you provided.
Awesome!!!! One of my very favorite descriptions (that regularly haunts me) is the beginning of the "Fall of Civilizations" episode on Assyria. It describes the soldiers in the "10000" Greek mercinary Army as they came upon the ruins of Assyria. I have wanted to learn more about this, particularly their view of history and their place in it, ever since. Thanks so much for this video! (Like them, I just stumbled upon this channel and video, I cannot wait to watch and learn more! ;) )
In Xenophon's Anabasis, he writes about coming across the ancient ruins of some city long forgotten to time, while his people were fleeing the persians. Today, we know that city to be Nimrud. An ancient Hittite city
Fascinating discussion. I would rephrase your conclusion, however. We, like ancient civilizations, do not necessarily understand accurately what our ancients' lives meant either. I think the difference is really that the ancients you discuss doing archaeology were motivated by justifying their rule & religion on their forefathers' while in the modern era we do archeology in order to understand previous civilizations as they were, not to justify our own. Thank you!
Whenever I hear that fun fact about Cleopatra and that she lived closer in time to the first McDonald's than to the construction of the Great Pyramids, I think about stuff like this.
This title of the video really got me. Was just scrolling, wait till I get home to watch this! So excited! How fascinating! I've always been interested in the whole 'antiquarian' like napoleon's fascination to go to Egypt
The more I dig into it, the more I'm convinced that, indeed, ancient people really evidently were that much more advanced than we generally give them credit for. You gotta remember: the Greeks learned their mathematics from the Babylonians much the same way we learn our maths from the Greeks. If you went to the Great Library of Alexandria and looked into their most advanced mathematics section, you would see Babylonian script and maybe even more ancient. A lot of the stuff that has Greek names to us, had Babylonian names to the Greeks. And we lost the great Library of Alexandria. Considering all of the ancient Babylonian stuff we lost, we probably were set up from then on to forever underestimate our own academic achievement.
We have most of what was in the great library of alexandria. Time and ignorance have lost us much more. I think the far greater loss, though, is the loss of all the accumulated wisdom of the people we call native americans... so many died, and only now are we scratching the surface as to what the ones who can't speak now actually had, let alone what they knew.
@@elgatto3133 Wrong we don't have the secrets of Greek Fire. Anyone out there saying that we have everything that was lost in the fire, has no real idea what was lost in the fire and I'll never ever take them seriously.
@@elgatto3133thats only on the north lol, spanish monks did extensive work to translate and even write the lenguage of the different tribes on S.A., there is a reason why here we have still a strong and very large indian community
@@Bosscheesemo Greek fire was a Byzantine/medieval Eastern Roman invention. The burning of Alexandria took place in 48 BC, way before Greek Fire was a thing. And although the exact recipe has been lost, we have something similar: Napalm. Obviously we don't know everything that was at Alexandria, but the magnitude of total loss from the ancient world has much more to do with the ravages of time than any deliberate destructive measure.
@@joaquinrodriguez227 They certainly did better about recording history but that doesn't mean smallpox didn't kill dozens or hundreds of cultures long before they made contact with the spanish
What got me thinking about this subject was my first visit to the Spanish city of Antequera. When the Romans arrived they named it Antequera which means the ancient place so what they saw there must have seemed truly ancient to them.
The Thumbnail is of Ahichhatra, it's history has been discredited. Any history prior to Buddhist age in India has been declared as MYTH by British Missionary. Now they are back to downgrading Dwarka, whose c14 dates back to 12,000yrs.
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations of their own.,. according to english missionaries,... yeah, seems legit 🤦
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations ... according to english missionaries... yeah that seems legit ...🤦
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations ... according to english missionaries... yeah that seems legit
Two historical quirks I find curious come out of Mexico. The first is Teotihuacan, a remarkable city that fell long before the Mexica rose. The Mexica did know of the ruins and even reused them, but knew very little of whomever built the city. In a much more recent example is the forgotten city of Tenochtitlan, larger than Paris in the 15th century, largely destroyed and re-invented in the 16th-19th centuries into Mexico City. Only in the late 20th century, while doing underground electrical work, was the ancient civilization rediscovered.
>Did Ancient Civilizations Have Their Own Ancient Civilizations? Yes. I take many ancient stories seriously and I think there is at least a kernel of truth in those ancient stories once their mythological embroidery has been stripped away. Plato lived about 2,000 years ago but he says that Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his time. So that means that if what Plato said about Atlantis is true (and I believe it was), then Atlantis existed 11,000 years ago and that was when Atlantis was destroyed, so it's not unreasonable to think that Atlantean civilisation arose thousands of years before 11,000 years ago. In one way or another, human civilisations have existed for vastly longer than most people seem to be willing to accept.
At a Clovis site they dug deeper and found evidence of people 50,000 years ago in North America. Also there is a list city off the coast of cuba that was last above water 50,000 years ago. The Easter island statues erroneously thought to be only hundreds of years old somehow have managed to accumulate thousand of years of sediment.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's fucking ridiculous.
Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's fucking ridiculous.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's ridiculous.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and poop in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's ridiculous.
I guess this is useful for people that ignorant of history. But Mycenae being the "titans" the Greeks saw as a fallen predecessor, for example, is well-known to anyone at all interested in the classical world. The same is true for the others. The Old Kingdom in Egypt, for example.
@@deiansalazar140 Aside from "source" being a pathetic dodge for losers who have no real argument, how does it apply here? Are you asking for proof that people who know Greek mythology or history are already aware that the Titanomachy is a reference to the Bronze Age Collapse?
@@KAZVorpal Oh so you don't use the scientific method and just make stuff up instead of relying on science , linguistics, evidence data and the tools we use able to help with that and rely on vague associations and bull crap like ancient alien cultists. I actually was interested but now I see you're just a kook, so nevermind.
thank you for this video. I was itching to explore on topics regarding lost civilizations but couldn't find anything I haven't watched already (or know from prior readings). It certainly didn't cross my mind, how ancient civilizations viewed their own past. Good video.
I found this so interesting. You did a nice clear explanation, and I would be thrilled to know more. I definitely will subscribe to this channel, which I have just found. I love it when I hear a historical question asked for which I have no informed answer. Thank you.
I like the idea that things like, "the fey", are what agricultural civilization might look like to hunter-gatherers. They have a weird area of land they are extremely possessive of, seldom leave, and do strange things with. They have huge amounts of stuff that seems hard to get in your world. People who visit them die, stay, or come back strangely changed. They absolutely can steal your children.
Just starting the video but I recall reading about how ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean had megalithic structures around them and a lot of them had no clue who made then. Truly a fascinating subject and I look forward to watching!
It puts me in mind of a fragmentary Anglo Saxon poem called "The Ruin" written in the 8th century, probably a description of the remains of the Roman city of Bath a lot of it is missing or damaged but the bit that still survives goes like this: This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on (next part damaged) a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together. Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity, until Fate the mighty changed that. Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour hot streams over grey stone................
Fascinating. This is the first time I'm hearing about how good some of these near East kingdoms and empires were with archaeology and restoration. Definitely want to learn more.
Haven't even watched the video. Just wanted to reiterate what the others have said. Missed you a lot man! So happy to see there's another video up. Take it easy! Hopefully the community won't demand too much from you.
Welcome back! You've been missed. Needed to thank you for your exemplary analysis of Late Antiquity through your videos, that have helped me massively this year in my studies. Really grateful, and was hoping that you would return soon! Thanks man! 🤍
I have to add that I really appreciate all that you do. I find this so interesting, but you know the price of the books, the time to put it all together. You are a real boon to a certain niche audience.
Thank you for this discussion. Always interesting to find illumination of the thoughts of people in various ages.
You're welcome!
yes, yes it is!
it's always good to remember that the ancients were the same as us in many ways. They were all just people. The human mind has changed very little over the last 10,000 years-- all of recorded history essentially
@@duolingoowl920 thank you for that beautiful truth. We sometimes remember ancient civilizations for the big things they built or how long they lasted or the history or armies. But we forget that there were peoples, and children and families and they had memories and maybe even hobbies and occasionally, maybe the poor lower class families still had time to play the fute on the roof or backyard of their small home. they were people.
@@TheFallofRome
Just imagine... there is almost a 3,000-year gap between the first unified Egyptian dynasty and the last. That's 1,000 years more than the gap between the last Egyptian dynasty and our time!
Just remember, eastern rome or the byzantine empire was still around a few hundred years ago.
The minoans on crete on the other had a lively trade network especially trading olive oil with objects from as far away as asia being found when rome was just a bunch of villages.
The hittites who lived in modern turkey forged iron and traded with egypt before the rise of greece.
Babylon and Uruk were cities in a time when world population was so low you could travel for months without finding another proper settlement.
Imagine a Roman collector of artefacts going to Egypt in 30 BC. The wars are finished, pax rules, the seas are free and open, and our Roman can try and buy things that are 1000 yrs older than the gap between us and the Romans.
Just think, Australia's First Nations societies existed 50,000 years before ancient Egypt.
Not 5,000... 50,000 YEARS
MIND BLOWING
EDIT. If this comment bothers you, then ask yourself why.
See below... or don't and save yourself the bother.
Note that it is a comment about the perception of time.
Let's see what bothers people the most about it.
Just like everyone else on the planet@@yt.personal.identification
Realistically it's less because a succession of foreign powers invaded, occupied and ruled Egypt for centuries before the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
There were archeologists in ancient times, which is honestly just mind-blowing but simultaneously unsurprising because some people have always been driven with the curiosity of our collective history
The key is to have a civilization progressed enough meeting the needs of people that they can specialize and do something other than gathering food or hunting.
Do you think a people who built monumental structures with astronomical precision hadn't figured everything else out? That's one of the reasons the structures were built in the first place. Black people were telling the future generations that there is nothing new under the sun. What socalled nonblack people refuse to accept as a collective is the fact that their ancestors lied about everything due to demonic savage antiBlack racism. I write as an Israelite and an historian who has had the privilege to study history from primary. World history is Black history. This explains why mainstream history is never read from primary sources. As an educator I tell students to never trust history out of the mouths of others. Ask them to cite from primary sources. Descriptions of famous people are readily available from primary sources. Lastly, if you want to know how long we have been around ask an Israelite. This is because socalled nonblack people have no access to deep memory because they are hybrids who suddenly appeared six to ten thousand years ago according to science and actual history. Shalom
@@Ed-ym4tu - religion or warfare follows - extra bodies that are not needed for food are first used for religion, warfare or other? These extra bodies push a way of life that was around for a very very very very very very long time onto this conveyor belt that moves faster the longer we are on it. 300,000 plus years of doing the same things - 10,000 years when change started maybe a bit longer and we are now flying into space.
Interesting that ancient people were creating or 'copying' ancient (to them) artifacts.
warfare is not caused by extra bodies that have something to do other than produce food. Warfare is caused by people realizing it's easier to let other people produce food, and then take it by force.
Fun fact: There are two Bronze Age prince's graves in my area (Leubingen and Helmsdorf in central Germany) that contained very similar grave goods. Some golden jewelry and weapons, a special stone that was associated with bronze making, some ceramic vessels and... * _drumroll_ * ...a stone axe from the Stone Age. The stone axes were both more than a thousand years older than the graves.
The hypothesis is that those ancient axes were used to legitimate the "old" right to rule for the respective prince.
I believe those graves belong to the Unetice Culture, if I'm remembering correctly! It's my favorite part of Bronze Age Europe. Haven't read about the Unetice in a while but there's some excellent work being done on it. You're lucky that you get to live so close to two such fascinating sites!
@@TheFallofRome
Correct, they are Únětice culture.
I don't have a car, so all those sites are still unreachable for me. They are usually not serviced by public transport. ^ ^
But yes - my region has a buttload of history. From Neanderthals who butchered a 4m high elephant*, over a mesolithic shaman**, over the Sky Disk of Nebra°, to the bones of Queen Editha°°... All pretty sensational finds here in the region. And that's just the outstanding ones - there are so many more. Pömmelte, for example, which is a Bronze Age woodhenge with an extensive settlement around it.
* Neumark-Nord 1 (ok, not quite as spectacular as the Schönigen spears)
** the "Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg"
° also from the Únětice culture
°° 10th century queen, wife of first Holy Roman Emperor Otto I., whose bones have been discovered in the Magdeburg cathedral
Where theres a will theres a way! If you want to see it bad enough, you will!
@@TacticalGamingFool The digging sites are probably not very spectacular. Just some hill next to a village.
The cool shit is in the museum in Halle.
Thuringia and Saxony were THE tin sources of the old Bronze Age... the deplation of those sources probably caused the civilization break in the mediterran region.
Ennigaldi: "Dad, let's burry the ruins so people with better technology can learn more"
Nabonidus: "Brilliant!"
Modern people: "We don't know where the capital was"
Literally, lmao
"Shouldn't we record the location?"
"Naw, how could anyone lose a city?"
Modern archeologists: "Thank god we don't know where the capital was. So people with better technology can learn more without destroying the context by digging everything up."
@@eljanrimsa5843 又又
@@merrittanimation7721”This city will last for ten thousand years! Of course we will be able to track this down later!”
*The city fell ten years later*
Sumer, the oldest of the Mesopotamian civilizations, was so ancient, it had been forgotten even by ancient times and was a surprise when the archaeologists discovered it
@@chiron14pl Their oldest story starts with "Remember when we first tasted bread?"
Sumer or later (if our civilization doesn't die) those missing ones will be found, studied and inspirest channels like this for folks like us.
@@MichaelLeBlanc-p4f Let's hope we thrive a while longer, and that our remnants could be made intelligible by future generations. All our digital past is now compromised by being in media and languages that we are rapidly losing. How many important docs still lie on floppy disks or old hard drives? Oh well, that's a problem for the future to solve
And Australia 's First Nations predate that society by 50,000 years.
@@yt.personal.identificationthe modern state of Australia is its First Nation.
Considering the Romans took tours of Egypt to look at their impressive and ancient pyramids and statues and buildings the short answer is yes.
The Romans would also view the Spartans as very respectable people. They’d have tours of Sparta and had a similar romanticized view of them that we have now
@@tylerreigner3627Really? That's surprising considering how pathetic the (non-mythological) Spartans were, especially by the time the Romans invaded Corinth.
@@coloradoing9172Funny thing about sparta, they were pathetic in the grand scheme of things but theyre really good at what modern people would call marketing. Sparta past their prime practically become more of a "warrior disneyland"(exaggerating here, but I mean, kindda what happened)
_From Cyrus to Alexander_ begins thus:
> When Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 B.C., the world was old. More significant, the world knew its antiquity.
that whole first page is one of my favorite book openings
It's an excellent book! I'm going to be drawing on it for a future video
Interesting
@@TheFallofRomescribbling all over the pages
"In those days
In those distant days
When we first made bread..."
This is literally the first thing that came to mind when reading the title of the video.
@@addisonmartin3200trans people
@addisonmartin3200 Peter Pringle is trying to keep together the frayed parts of the tapestry of human history.
... and beer :-D
@@duncanluciak5516 Farya Faraji is absolute gigachad in that regard
One of my favorite facts about Ancient Egypt is that they had their own scholars who researched Ancient Egypt. Cleopatra lived closer to the modern day than to the building of the pyramids. When the Pyramid of Djoser was being built during the Third Dynasty, Gobekli Tepe was around twice as old to them than that pyramid is to us. At the founding of the First Dynasty, the Predynastic Egyptians had been around for over 3000 years before that, and the Nile Valley is known to have been inhabited by humans and archaic humans for between one million and two million years.
Yaaas! We've been around so long... and both forgotten and lost so much. We fight over how old the sphinx is, and even it's original state. Human history is absolutely fascinating.
I've read the first "civilisations" in Egypt are about 90.000 years old, then another 45.000.
Of course on a small case, but it was first tries.
From the french egyptologist Nicolas Grimal.
Yeah, its interesting to think about this. And the fact that the Nile shaped not just agriculture but also the political and social structures of Ancient Egypt
When the Spanish encountered the Incas and their amazing cities and stone work, the Spanish asked them how did they possibly build something so incredible and advanced. The Incas replied "this was here before us". And still today you can look at the Inca ruins and see their stone walls on top of a more advanced stone wall from a previous civilization. We think of ancient Egypt being ancient. But we are closer in time to the last Pharoah then the last Pharoah was to the building of the great pyramid of Egypt. So to the last Pharoah of Egypt "Cleopatra" the building of the great pyramid must have seemed very ancient.
Inca was just their dynasty.
I don't think the Inca built on earlier stuff. They reused earlier stuff but I don't think they built more stone on it.
The difference in quality between the lower and higher layers is probably just the lower layers needing go be stronger and more perfect.
What civilization would be before the Incas?
The Tiwanaku, the Wari, the Chavin, the Moche, the Paracas, the Chimú, the Huari and the Nazca. If you look at some photos of Inca ruins it looks like a 3 year old child putting Legos on top of an expert Lego builders build.
It's obvious something very interesting happened in South America. If something like Atlantis existed deep in the past, I think they either saw it or were influenced by it.
The epics of gilgamesh starts with
“in those ancient days”
The Epic of Gilgamesh c. 5000 BP has a line about civilisations rising and falling like the tides.
I'm starting to believe that the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza were much much older than Sumer. They might not even be the oldest evidence of extremely early civilizations, just the least weathered.
Anacyclosis or metabole politeion or Rota Fortunae - the reality that radically enlightened, Jacobin philosophies of history despise...
Peter Pringle has a YT channel. He does old songs on replicas of ancient instruments. He did the song of Gilgamesh, our oldest song. The song begins "In those days, in those ancient days, in those nights in those long ago nights, when the heavens and the earth were first parted, when men were established on the land, when the fires first burned in sacred shines...". Our oldest song recalls an even more ancient time. Wonderful.
A gem of a video and song.
That’s awesome
Farya Faraji
This is literally the type of history content I breathe for. Finished some stuff after Milton in FL now can relax to some history.
Glad you're safe!
@@TheFallofRome TY!
Hopefully you're not in Hillsborough County. Us in Orlando got lucky.
@@1TakoyakiStore St Petersburg :'(
Enjoyed the video very much. Excellent question! How does one define ancient? When do ancient times start? According to my daughter, it was around the time that I was born.
Welcome back! You've been truly missed!
Why are comments disabled on his other videos?
@@priyazu4000 Stuff was getting clogged with election related bots etc so I turned them off while I was away. I want to turn them all on again now that I'm back, but the settings arent' adjusting so it looks like I have to go through and manually do each video. I'll do it in chunks when I have time unless the general reset setting actually updates for me in YT studio
I couldn’t agree more. So glad to have you back!
What fascinates me most on this topic is how some cultures managed to maintain at least partially, oral traditions going back to the lithic periods. I forget if it was mentioned in one of your videos or not, but there's one tribe in Canada that has oral historic memory of a memory of there being something akin to mammoths (memory of a memory). Likewise while not having ancient civilizations in how we think of them, Australian Aboriginals have oral traditions back to the lithic periods with mention of things that are most likely marsupial megafauna long gone.
In regards to Greece, and keeping in mind how accurate Homer's Iliad is to the Mycenean era in regards to warfare and equipment, it leaves me wondering if classical Greek lost something in the translation to written language (or we lost the texts over centuries) preserving memories of the early settlement of the region or oral histories of the earlier faiths such as of the 'primordials' in hellenic mythos. Oral histories overall seem to be stronger at preserving incredibly old knowledge.
Frankly, I don't think that writing them down was as critical issue though definitely it makes for more inaccuracies as well but just how Greeks interacted with a lot more cultures and that means that their language chnaged more. And when it comes for preserving oral traditions it matters a lot as usually myths, stories were musical or at least quite melodic - it really just makes it easier to remember. Change language more often then story needs to adapt for the changes in speech, new melodies need to be created to fit new rythms etc.
Not sure how reliable those are. Nobody reads The Odyssey and assumes that the mythical creatures must be references to prehistoric megafauna, or that Paul Bunyan is a historical memory of Neanderthals.
Just imagine if we could hear the long oral tradition of the whales!
I agree with you. I forgot where I saw it but I read about a conversation between a man and the god that gave the Egyptians writing (on a tomb wall, if I remember correctly) where the man stated that writing was killing memory. I thought that was a profound insight. I mean, look what "smart phones" are doing to us...
Check out "Edge of Memory" by Patrick Nunn. It's about exactly that, with plenty of cool examples dating back as far as 20,000 years (dated by identifying geological events of known age as being the subject of a myth)
I imagine that a lot of people's tall tales and campfire stories were inspired by the ruins of forgotten civilizations.
There are a lot of tribes with a myth of a hero killing the demon snake with a lightning weapon.
@@thealkymystsnakes are top of scary. Lightning is top of power and mystery.
@@thealkymyst crazy stuff back in the day.
Dangerous animals being confused for supernatural forces.
Legendary tales about everything.
The inability to confirm or deny it make us think about something more which leads to the creation of religion.
@G.A.C_Preserve 🤣 when's the last time you mistook a bear for a dragon/giant snake? The ancients weren't dumb or they'd have died before reproducing & we'd not be here now to feel superior to them 😉
@@JimmyMatis-h9y You get it. Reality is a much stranger place than modernity wants us to believe.
Your opening question immediately brought to mind Plato's reference to information about ancient civilizations' ideas about more ancient civilizations. He credited the story of Atlantis to an Egyptian priest's translation of an ancient temple inscription. In addition, Greek medical knowledge is attributed to Egypt. I hope you will be covering this at some point. Also, a long time ago, I was introduced to the theory that the Greeks encountered skeletal remains of mega-fauna and attributed them to their mostt ancient myths, especially the skull of one with a large hole being the source of the cyclops story.
A lot of Greek philosophy also comes from the Egyptian Mystery Schools. Many Greek philosophers lived as initiates in Egyptian temples for years and sometimes even decades to learn all their sciences (of the material and spiritual world), before establishing their own schools in Greece. Many of them even faced opposition from their own countrymen for trying to spread weird foreign knowledge in Greek lands.
The skull is that of an elephant?
@@Gelatinocyte2 Yes, that's what I heard, but of the elephant's much larger ancestor.
@@NostalgiaforInfinityNonsense. Egypt "mystery schools" were late Hellenistic/Greco-Romano-Egyptian.
@@toomanymarys7355maybe he's using the wrong terms for it but religious schooling in Egypt is certainly older than Greece.
The Aztec folklore says they came from a northern land known as as Aztlan into central Mexico with them viewing the classical Mesoamerican civilization as greater than themselves.
There’s an old Apache story I was told as a kid that says dogs brought death to the world. Given that Sirius is the Dog Star and the upper dryas impact would have appeared to come from Sirius to people who lived in the northern hemisphere. Also a pre Columbus story talks about white brothers that lost there way and follow a cross. Phoenician ships sails had the Red Cross later adopted by the Spanish. It also states that Cadiz in Spain (at least 3000 year old Phoenician settlement) was stated by the Roman to be the place where Phoenicians out fitted their largest ships for trade in far away lands. Cadiz is situated on the Atlantic. Why would Phoenicians who had ports in the Mediterranean need ports on the Atlantic?
In Kon Tiki, the author talks of Incan folktales that say pale skinned men with red hair settled on the northeen coast of modern day brazil (where ocean currents would have carried travelers from europe and north africa) and built stone cities. They were then pushed west until they reached the west coast of south america. The incans then say that they themselves conquered the last of the cities that these pale skinned men built, and used these cities as the foundation of their own empire. They go on to say that the pale skinned red haired people traveled west along ocean currents until they settled on the polynesian islands, such as easter island and beyond. The oral tradition of these islanders have a lot of similarities with eachother and the incan stories, however the islanders that were discovered by eurpeans were not the pale skinned islanders. The islanders discovered by europeans had replaced the first inhabitants in a series of bloody conquests that spanned many islands over thousands of miles.
I don't know how accurate the author is, especially since he wrote his book in the 1930's, but if what he says is true, it opens the door to a pandora's box of untouched history
@@JRRGimli only euros believe this bs. Europe was under ice when the world was building cities. Euros feel stupid so they try and steal credit from the rest of the world.
@@JRRGimliThe story is false. There's no stone ruins of the Inca type in Eastern Brazil, neither is there any culture that stretches from there to the Andes.
And you should be a bit skeptical of the pale skinned red haired giant stories. Alot of European story recorders of that era had a bad habit of reinterpreting native stories that vaguely mention brightness or colours into racial characteristics while some native stories are recent innovations from interactions with the outside world.
I will say this, some Polynesians do have a narrative of coming from the East but we're certain most of them came from the West(Asia) and that most of the Islands were unsettled before them. We do have some evidence of people from the Americas making it to Polynesia maybe even before the Polynesians but those people are certainly of the same group as modern and pre-colonial native Andean peoples(from genetic testing).
They are ancient Phoenician emmigrants. It’s been proven that their DNA descends from the Levant.
Classical Greek understanding of Mycenaean Bronze Age civilization is very cool, I don't know if you cover it here because I haven't watched the video yet. This is a great idea to discuss!
Not here, no, but I'm going to do multiple versions of this, more or less. At least one will feature that topic. There's dozens of examples, if not hundreds, so one giant video would probably be impossible to produce
@@TheFallofRome this topic is endlessly fascinating, so don't be afraid to keep pumping out the videos
@@TheFallofRome Was about to comment this, would really like to see a video on this!
And in broad strokes, accurate, as intelligent DNA studies find.
The Ancient Greeks attributed to themselves lots of blonde hair. Interesting that it virtually disappeared by admixture over time!
Some civilization was so old and mysterious, archaeologist still debates about its existence. The ancient text of Mahabharata mentioned kingdom of Krishna which sunk to the ocean, much like Indian's Atlantis. Others are less mythical but debatable like the Xia Dynasty, they knew it exist, but lack of historical records further complicates things. Now, imagine what these ancient civilizations thought about the civilizations before them, which also lost and forgotten?
Truly a thought provoking ideas, I love this kind of content
夏 is just a step below 商, and 商 is known to exist from their 甲骨文, the question then remains: what older dynasties there really were?
I think it's quite clear that they've found and excavated the Xia. The only reason to deny it is because they didn't write it down, but civilizations are allowed to not have writing.
First time watcher here. I'm 2 minutes in and hooked. Looking forward to exploring this interesting question with the host. Our understanding of early civilizations are always evolving, but how well they knew about each other and the ones that came before is always going to be fun to
explore.
Also, I already get the impression that this guy has actually read most of the books on that flex background.
HA! I've only read like 3/4...there's more that you don't see off to my left, it's a combination of mine and my wife's stuff. It's a long, ongoing process. Happy you found the video!!
@TheFallofRome loved this video and your presentation. I'm going to subscribe and check out more of your work. Would you consider a follow up video, that explores if any of the older ancient (bronze age) civilizations had any thoughts, understanding, stories of older civilization? what is the oldest civilization/s that we have enough knowledge about to describe their understanding of history?
PS: I knew you really read those books! After I watch some more of your videos may I ask for recommendations?
@@jamesmasters2386 Sure thing--any topic you're interested in, just let me know. Just be aware that I did turn off comments during my several month-long break from YT so i'm working on turning them back on--you may have to come back here for a recommendation comment. I'm already writing a script for a follow up video
The first line of the Epic of Gilgamesh from 2100bc: "Ud rēa, ud sura rēa"
"In those day, those ancient days"
We are ants to time.
Learning cosmology makes it obvious yet impossible to really grasp.
Learning history or archaeology makes it a smaller more digestible truth, but one that is far more personal.
I adore both for simply allowing us to glimpse a slice of what was.
You don’t know how much I’ve missed your uploads. Glad to have you back, hope all is well.
The Historian's Craft Guy: "Did ancient civilizations have ancient civilizations?"
Gilgamesh: "Hold my beer."
Ancient archaeology, ancient museums, and ancient forgeries love this content.
Hearing of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand's ignorance of the Assyrian Empire of only 200 years' earlier, I wonder if a troop of foreign soldiers finding themselves sent to Paris for some reason would have much awareness of Napoleon and his Empire.
The US maintains military bases in France lmao
@@ayathados6629 General de Gaulle ordered the US to leave in 1967. If they still have any bases there they must be clandestine.
You can find a lot of this in chinese historical writings. For example, the "Bamboo Annals" is a collection of ancient text written on bamboo scrolls buried in an ancient tomb (tomb of King Xiang of Wei, died 296 BC) discovered by people from Western Jin dynasty (281 AD). The actual bamboo scrolls have long gone so we can only read the copies written by the people from Western Jin dynasty, which started with an introduction of how they discovered the scrolls. It's fascinating to read that people back in Western Jin dynasty was baffled by the scrolls they found, mentioning the text was "really ancient" and they had to find professional scholar to decipher it. They also mentioned the text predates the Qin unification of China thus survived the book burning ordered by emperor Qin.
We also get to know that before the invention of writing, people from the ancient past used ropes to remember stuff because someone from 2000+ years ago wrote that "our ancient ancestors from few thousand years ago used to use ropes for recording important events, they will tie a big knot for big event and smaller knot for smaller event". They also mentioned how "their ancestors" invented the first chinese characters, which was inspired by animal footsteps, and how they discovered fire (tribesmen from Suiren-shi noticed sparks were created when the birds pecking a type of wood, and they successfully created the first fire by doing the same on the wood) and even how they built their first house (someone from a tribe called Youchao-shi builds a hut on the tree using wooden sticks and leaves, and asked his tribesmen to move out from their caves and live on the trees with him). Most of the early history we now consider as mythological was actually historical record from even earlier ancient civilization collected and passed down to us by the civilization we consider ancient.
It's really mind blowing to learn about something so specific and detailed which we can't even find from the archeological evidence.
I would love to see a video that covers all the rennaisance type events through history. Or times when information was lost and subsequently discovered again. Could be a fascinating topic.
The algorithm found me. I was listening to fall asleep...I WAS trying to sleep. Now I'm just listening. Fascinating. My general focus of ancient history has been mostly on south and central America, like who built machu picchu, and just how old and who were the olmecs... we've lost so much of our history. Thank you for videos like this! Cheers to what we can actually know.
This is quite a fascinating topic! I have usually heard a variant of this question in relation to the widely-circulated fact that Cleopatra is chronologically closer to the 21st century than the construction of the Pyramids. I look forward to watching the rest of the video! :)
Good to see you back, and looking sharp 👍 This is a topic that has always fascinated me.
Of course. When the Greek Herodotus was visiting and writing about Egypt, he referred to a society that was as far or farther in his past than his Greece was from our own day, even though he lived 25 centuries ago.
Myth building hasn't changed. Their is a legend of a giant turtle at a local pond. Everyone and their brother knows someone it saved as well as spotting it surfacing under a full moon. People even painted and built small rock effigies to the turtle when I was a kid.
You're back! :) Hope you're doing well
Yes, much better than several months ago! Glad to be back
Amazing as usual! Glad to get a wonderfully informative and thought provoking upload like this from you.
Can you do more of this? Perhaps analyzing specific civilizations and how their mythology could have been a warped mythologized version of history?
Good to see you alive your videos are sorely missed Ive literally watched most of the other ones you’ve made in the mean time
Thank you for the very interesting video! It is fascinating how the Neo-Babylonian rulers harnessed restoration efforts to bolster their own claims to power. It makes one think of other politically-motivated restoration efforts, such as those of Mussolini's Fascist regime. It is good to have you back :)
This sounds like when the Peisistratos, the last Tyrant of Attica, invited the Sons Of Homer (the school of Oral Poetry supposedly founded by him) from Chios on Asia Minor to come to Athens (supposedly the last never-conquered city from the Mycenaen Period) and set the poems down in then-modern Greek script.
Glad to see you back. Your the best history channel on all of TH-cam.
This is some of my favorite aspects of history, these questions are amazing to ponder. Thank you for sharing.
Gobekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. That we know of.
For reference, Sumeria is about 6,000 years old.
For all we know, Gobekli Tepe might have had ancient civilizations of their own.
Our perspective on settled societies might be about to really broaden its scope in the next couple decades.
They definitely had their own stories and lore based off people lost to time which I find fascinating.
I think your conclusion is right on point. In the British Isles there are neolithic burial mounds with much later Roman burials as well. It seems fairly clear that the Romans believed these were sacred places appropriate for burying their own dead, even though they most likely had no clue who had built them originally.
So happy to have you back, you ask the most interesting questions.
If you step outside of archaeology and into textual evidence, I would suggest that the Assyrian King List fits in this category. Specifically the "kings who lived in tents" section of the list. Probably first written in the 14th century BCE, the king list was maintained and added to continuously into the 8th millennium BCE.
Have been here I think before you reached 10k so happy to see all your hard work paying off and about to reach 100k. Well done buddy. Well earned. And here is to 200k!
Thank you! Would love if this video was the one to blow up and push me past 100K
@@TheFallofRomeLet me help with that. Nice video
"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of."
- Some wizard dude.
History became legend. Legend became myth.
@@Archangelm127 and myth vanished,
I litteraly watched conan the barbarian last night
I'm so glad you're back, it's great to see you posting again. You're one of my favorite channels on TH-cam. I hope your life is going better and you're doing well.
im designing a ttrpg setting inspired by ancient history and 90s dungeoncrawler games and this video is so incredibly invaluable 😍 oh my gooood... it's so interesting about the greek idea of deteriorating ages and people getting smaller, that's really similar to the lore of dark souls, i haven't heard anyone mention that before.. great work 🥺✨
later civilizations took that idea and ran with it too.
It's the exact opposite of dark souls, the game's totally and completely about infinitely repeating cycles, greeks were about a constant direction.
Also you're not making a game, nice lies dumbass
Welcome back Mike, and hope that all was well with your last few months and family ! Happy to see new videos from your channel.
Yup things are much better, thank you for asking. Happy to be back!
Thanks for doing this, glad to see you back.
1:15 thank you so very much for addressing that so swiftly and concisely.
I would of had the hardest of times following along without a proper framework statement, such as the one you provided.
Welcome back!! Hope you're doing well :) interesting video as always
Awesome!!!! One of my very favorite descriptions (that regularly haunts me) is the beginning of the "Fall of Civilizations" episode on Assyria. It describes the soldiers in the "10000" Greek mercinary Army as they came upon the ruins of Assyria. I have wanted to learn more about this, particularly their view of history and their place in it, ever since. Thanks so much for this video! (Like them, I just stumbled upon this channel and video, I cannot wait to watch and learn more! ;) )
8:46 Correction: the original Assyrian name of the city is "Kalhu", and "Nimrod" is the modern name.
In Xenophon's Anabasis, he writes about coming across the ancient ruins of some city long forgotten to time, while his people were fleeing the persians.
Today, we know that city to be Nimrud. An ancient Hittite city
THE GOAT HAS RETURNED
Baaaahhhhhhh
This is Mesopotamia. Goat-FISH!
Great video, really facinating topic! Am so happy that you're back!
Fascinating discussion. I would rephrase your conclusion, however. We, like ancient civilizations, do not necessarily understand accurately what our ancients' lives meant either. I think the difference is really that the ancients you discuss doing archaeology were motivated by justifying their rule & religion on their forefathers' while in the modern era we do archeology in order to understand previous civilizations as they were, not to justify our own. Thank you!
Welcome back! Glad to have you back. Hope all is well!
I'd be interested in the perspective of ancient China on this question
Whenever I hear that fun fact about Cleopatra and that she lived closer in time to the first McDonald's than to the construction of the Great Pyramids, I think about stuff like this.
8:11 they did WHAT to their opponents??
Gotta work off them blisters
I was waiting to the whole time to see what he was going to say 😂 Did not disappoint
This title of the video really got me.
Was just scrolling, wait till I get home to watch this!
So excited! How fascinating! I've always been interested in the whole 'antiquarian'
like napoleon's fascination to go to Egypt
The more I dig into it, the more I'm convinced that, indeed, ancient people really evidently were that much more advanced than we generally give them credit for.
You gotta remember: the Greeks learned their mathematics from the Babylonians much the same way we learn our maths from the Greeks. If you went to the Great Library of Alexandria and looked into their most advanced mathematics section, you would see Babylonian script and maybe even more ancient. A lot of the stuff that has Greek names to us, had Babylonian names to the Greeks.
And we lost the great Library of Alexandria. Considering all of the ancient Babylonian stuff we lost, we probably were set up from then on to forever underestimate our own academic achievement.
We have most of what was in the great library of alexandria. Time and ignorance have lost us much more.
I think the far greater loss, though, is the loss of all the accumulated wisdom of the people we call native americans... so many died, and only now are we scratching the surface as to what the ones who can't speak now actually had, let alone what they knew.
@@elgatto3133
Wrong we don't have the secrets of Greek Fire. Anyone out there saying that we have everything that was lost in the fire, has no real idea what was lost in the fire and I'll never ever take them seriously.
@@elgatto3133thats only on the north lol, spanish monks did extensive work to translate and even write the lenguage of the different tribes on S.A., there is a reason why here we have still a strong and very large indian community
@@Bosscheesemo Greek fire was a Byzantine/medieval Eastern Roman invention. The burning of Alexandria took place in 48 BC, way before Greek Fire was a thing.
And although the exact recipe has been lost, we have something similar: Napalm.
Obviously we don't know everything that was at Alexandria, but the magnitude of total loss from the ancient world has much more to do with the ravages of time than any deliberate destructive measure.
@@joaquinrodriguez227 They certainly did better about recording history but that doesn't mean smallpox didn't kill dozens or hundreds of cultures long before they made contact with the spanish
Greatly informative. Glad I get to be in your first 100k subscribers
My guy, you just earned yourself a permanent spot in the blunt rotation.
What got me thinking about this subject was my first visit to the Spanish city of Antequera. When the Romans arrived they named it Antequera which means the ancient place so what they saw there must have seemed truly ancient to them.
The Thumbnail is of Ahichhatra, it's history has been discredited. Any history prior to Buddhist age in India has been declared as MYTH by British Missionary.
Now they are back to downgrading Dwarka, whose c14 dates back to 12,000yrs.
the sheer amount of pseudoscience pouring out of india right now makes it hard to credit any claims.
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations of their own.,. according to english missionaries,... yeah, seems legit 🤦
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations ...
according to english missionaries...
yeah that seems legit ...🤦
So the long history of India before Buddhism, for some reason didn't allow for civilization to flourish...,then came Siddhartha and "made" Buddhism a thing and only after that were the ancient diverse peoples of India "allowed" to form civilizations ...
according to english missionaries...
yeah that seems legit
Why can't I reply to your comment? ǀ̬ɛvvTube doesn't let me....
Two historical quirks I find curious come out of Mexico. The first is Teotihuacan, a remarkable city that fell long before the Mexica rose. The Mexica did know of the ruins and even reused them, but knew very little of whomever built the city. In a much more recent example is the forgotten city of Tenochtitlan, larger than Paris in the 15th century, largely destroyed and re-invented in the 16th-19th centuries into Mexico City. Only in the late 20th century, while doing underground electrical work, was the ancient civilization rediscovered.
>Did Ancient Civilizations Have Their Own Ancient Civilizations?
Yes. I take many ancient stories seriously and I think there is at least a kernel of truth in those ancient stories once their mythological embroidery has been stripped away. Plato lived about 2,000 years ago but he says that Atlantis existed about 9,000 years before his time. So that means that if what Plato said about Atlantis is true (and I believe it was), then Atlantis existed 11,000 years ago and that was when Atlantis was destroyed, so it's not unreasonable to think that Atlantean civilisation arose thousands of years before 11,000 years ago. In one way or another, human civilisations have existed for vastly longer than most people seem to be willing to accept.
At a Clovis site they dug deeper and found evidence of people 50,000 years ago in North America. Also there is a list city off the coast of cuba that was last above water 50,000 years ago. The Easter island statues erroneously thought to be only hundreds of years old somehow have managed to accumulate thousand of years of sediment.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's fucking ridiculous.
Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's fucking ridiculous.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and shit in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's ridiculous.
@@threecheersforsweetrevenge8709 Consider this, mainstream anthropologists claim that so-called 'anatomically modern humans' arose about 300,000 years ago in Africa yet they also claim that the first civilisation arose about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. So you mean to tell me that humans, with all of their inquisitiveness and all of their industriousness, did nothing but swing from trees and poop in caves for the first 295,000 years of their existence? It's ridiculous.
Welcome back❤ I have missed you well researched content.
I guess this is useful for people that ignorant of history.
But Mycenae being the "titans" the Greeks saw as a fallen predecessor, for example, is well-known to anyone at all interested in the classical world.
The same is true for the others. The Old Kingdom in Egypt, for example.
Source?
@@deiansalazar140 Aside from "source" being a pathetic dodge for losers who have no real argument, how does it apply here?
Are you asking for proof that people who know Greek mythology or history are already aware that the Titanomachy is a reference to the Bronze Age Collapse?
@@KAZVorpal Oh so you don't use the scientific method and just make stuff up instead of relying on science , linguistics, evidence data and the tools we use able to help with that and rely on vague associations and bull crap like ancient alien cultists. I actually was interested but now I see you're just a kook, so nevermind.
Great video! Very informative on a difficult topic while still being easy to understand
thank you for this video. I was itching to explore on topics regarding lost civilizations but couldn't find anything I haven't watched already (or know from prior readings). It certainly didn't cross my mind, how ancient civilizations viewed their own past.
Good video.
Great to have you back your content has been sorely missed!
Always wondered.
Good to have you back again.
I found this so interesting. You did a nice clear explanation, and I would be thrilled to know more. I definitely will subscribe to this channel, which I have just found. I love it when I hear a historical question asked for which I have no informed answer. Thank you.
Awesome, thank you!
I like the idea that things like, "the fey", are what agricultural civilization might look like to hunter-gatherers. They have a weird area of land they are extremely possessive of, seldom leave, and do strange things with. They have huge amounts of stuff that seems hard to get in your world. People who visit them die, stay, or come back strangely changed. They absolutely can steal your children.
The Realest One on TH-cam's back to educate us. Hope your doing alright.
Nice video. I'll watch some of your other stuff, you have a good clear way of explaining.
welcome back, fantastic video
More to come!
Just starting the video but I recall reading about how ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean had megalithic structures around them and a lot of them had no clue who made then. Truly a fascinating subject and I look forward to watching!
I dig the new look, you're crushing it man
just started the video and i know this is gonna hit
It puts me in mind of a fragmentary Anglo Saxon poem called "The Ruin" written in the 8th century, probably a description of the remains of the Roman city of Bath a lot of it is missing or damaged but the bit that still survives goes like this:
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers,
the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged,
chipped roofs are torn, fallen,
undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses
the mighty builders, perished and fallen,
the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations
of people have departed. Often this wall,
lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another,
remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.
Still the masonry endures in winds cut down
persisted on
(next part damaged)
a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound
the wall with wire brace wondrously together.
Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that.
Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came,
death took all the brave men away;
their places of war became deserted places,
the city decayed. The rebuilders perished,
the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate,
and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles
of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground
broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior,
joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour,
proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings;
looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones,
at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery,
at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.
The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat
in wide surge; the wall enclosed all
in its bright bosom, where the baths were,
hot in the heart. That was convenient.
Then they let pour hot streams over grey stone................
Remember. wooden sailing ships were common place and the backbone of the entire global trade economy only a little over 100 years ago.
Fascinating. This is the first time I'm hearing about how good some of these near East kingdoms and empires were with archaeology and restoration. Definitely want to learn more.
Thank you for this informative video on the history of history.
Excellent subject and well presented. And love the 'ancient' bookshelf!
Thank you! The shelf is very heavy lmao
Thank you for a great playthrough. I love the outdoor setting for the game.
You rock and your content rocks
Awesome video. I am jealous of your capability to speak so clearly for such a long time.
In this one I'm actually working from a script, but off the top of my head is a hit or miss depending on the subject
Very happy to see you back 😄
Haven't even watched the video.
Just wanted to reiterate what the others have said. Missed you a lot man!
So happy to see there's another video up. Take it easy! Hopefully the community won't demand too much from you.
Wow - a lot to digest here - very high signal to noise ratio - you have my subscription👍
Welcome back! You've been missed. Needed to thank you for your exemplary analysis of Late Antiquity through your videos, that have helped me massively this year in my studies. Really grateful, and was hoping that you would return soon! Thanks man! 🤍
You're welcome!!
I was ready for three hours of this. Made all my spidy-senses tingle. All my favorite names and dates.
I’ve got more coming :) this is a huge topic
@TheFallofRome my hero!!
I have to add that I really appreciate all that you do. I find this so interesting, but you know the price of the books, the time to put it all together. You are a real boon to a certain niche audience.
I just found your channel, I love it! I am working my way throught your work, thank you!