[Ancient History] The disappearance of the dwarves (Elder Scrolls reference)

[Lep]

I've always loved ancient history. It's the only history that's interesting to me, whether it be ancient ruins, lost knowledge or mythology. Personally, I believe there is actually some truth to mythology when you get deep into it. Hard to believe that of all history recorded, mythology was all made up by men.

 

If there's anyone else out there who likes ancient history as well then you'll surely know of the hundreds of ruins out there and the fact that there are no explanations for how any of them were built other than that somewhere down the line, we somehow lost a significant amount of knowledge. There are some structures with stones weighing over 900 tons - stones we don't even have the technology today to lift.

 

Our "technology" today is pathetic, primitive and its embarrassing to be living in this era. We are the stupidest humans to have existed in the entire history of the human race. Sure, getting to space is new, but we did it with pathetic technology.

 

The common theme with lost knowledge is basically geometry/triangles, space/planets, math, anti-gravity and other things that the last person to have utilized wasn't even that long ago... it was Edward Leedskalnin in 1951 who built Coral Castle.

 

This then goes further into religion and then illuminati or free masons, which pretty much all tie into each other, but what I'm wondering is how the hell does an important amount of knowledge get lost to the entire human race when thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands had this knowledge or witnessed this knowledge in the past? It doesn't make sense to actually lose this kind of knowledge.

 

It's really curious. And if we should ever recover this knowledge again I'm sure we'll all be like, "Well, that was obvious."

[nine naked men]

take your meds

[RpgGamer]

Our species got dumber when the Library of Alexandria was burned. But at least we started putting iodine in our salt. Boosts us back up a whopping 15 IQ points on average.

 

I can only imagine how crazy our understanding of our universe would be if that library survived though. It took us thousands of years just to rediscover that the Earth was a sphere for Christ's sake.

[Sy_Accursed]

People thinking that earth was flat is a total myth. Most historic records document people perfectly well knew it was round for most of history and there's only a couple of examples of people who thought otherwise. Yet these oddballs are the ones people focus on, despite being a great minority.

[Giordano]

And the Library of Alexandria being destroyed was a blow to Western/Greek thought. Indian and Chinese knowledge were kept, for instance.

 

 

There's no doubt some technology was forgotten in the past, but I doubt we don't have something similar/better today.

[Ginger_Warrior]

People thinking that earth was flat is a total myth. Most historic records document people perfectly well knew it was round for most of history and there's only a couple of examples of people who thought otherwise. Yet these oddballs are the ones people focus on, despite being a great minority.

If I remember rightly, and I'm going back a good eight years here, the whole "Earth is flat, edge of the world" theory stemmed from the Macedonian Empire, which had effectively become, geographically speaking, too large through military conquest to sustain itself economically, and they effectively made up a lie to convince people not to expand it further. Of course, it was pretty easy to spread propaganda back then. That said, Aristotle, even during Alexander III's reign, had started to talk openly about a round Earth.

 

What is definitely true is that Columbus wasn't flying in the face of reality when he "discovered" America. He knew perfectly well that the Earth was round and, eventually, if he carried on in that direction he'd make it make to Eurasia, somewhere.

[Sy_Accursed]

 

People thinking that earth was flat is a total myth. Most historic records document people perfectly well knew it was round for most of history and there's only a couple of examples of people who thought otherwise. Yet these oddballs are the ones people focus on, despite being a great minority.

If I remember rightly, and I'm going back a good eight years here, the whole "Earth is flat, edge of the world" theory stemmed from the Macedonian Empire, which had effectively become, geographically speaking, too large through military conquest to sustain itself economically, and they effectively made up a lie to convince people not to expand it further. Of course, it was pretty easy to spread propaganda back then. That said, Aristotle, even during Alexander III's reign, had started to talk openly about a round Earth.

 

What is definitely true is that Columbus wasn't flying in the face of reality when he "discovered" America. He knew perfectly well that the Earth was round and, eventually, if he carried on in that direction he'd make it make to Eurasia, somewhere.

 

 

Well yeah the entire purpose of the voyage was to try and discover a shorter sea trading route between England and Asia, the only shock was the fact a whole continent they hadn't known about existed inbetween.

[Estonian dude]

Actually, even that had been predicted by some ancient Greeks. Can't remember the names right now.

'cept noone would listen.

[Estonian dude]

Umm, I am studying cartography and topography at the moment and just TODAY I was made sure that actually Columbus' temporaries thought the world's radius was massively shorter, so that the voyage from Portugal to East Indies (Indonesia nowadays) would be around 12 000 km's. In reality it is over 24 000 kilometres. If they had known that, they would have never gone on such a voyage. That is way too long distance, for even for this short voyage most of the crew members had scurvy.

[RpgGamer]

There was also ancient Greeks that knew that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe way back when during Alexandria times. The library was built on traded scrolls, so knowledge from everywhere in known civilization was lost. Also Egyptians even before that were able to construct massive pyramids in coordination to the alignment of the stars. They certainly did have calculus and trigonometry, even if it wasn't as sophisticated as today's trig/calc is.

 

Going even further back, the Eastern Island heads and Stone Henge dont have any completely proven method of construction. Whoever made them was WAY ahead of their time.

[Estonian dude]

The Easter Island heads are pretty certain by now. Stonehenge remains the mystery.

[Ginger_Warrior]

The Moai statues aren't so much a measure of great construction; they were built around 1400 AD so it's not that impressive. The Vikings managed to sail across the Atlantic 500 years sooner, for comparison. They're more of an economic wonder. It would have taken an incredibly well-developed and prosperous economic model to sustain the workers on the project for such prolonged periods of time, one far more effective than the feudalistic model which was dominant across Europe at the time.

 

Stonehenge truly is a mystery, although again, it's one that needs putting into historical context. Before construction on the version of Stonehenge we know had even commenced, the Egyptians had already completed the largest Great Pyramid of Giza.

[Estonian dude]

Would you travel to Venus tomorrow?

Among lower class there were still rumours and beliefs that earth could be flat. No sailors really liked sailing anywhere too far from land. Noone knew what would expect them.

 

Columbus himself was Portuguese, but he sailed under Spanish flag. Why? Since noone was willing to support him in Portugal. Portugal was wealthiest country in Europe at the time. Spain wanted a piece of that trading pie and it's the only reason why they were willing to risk it.

[stevepole]

I avoid over glorify the past as I find the present to be very satisfying, 

[Quyneax]

People thinking that earth was flat is a total myth. Most historic records document people perfectly well knew it was round for most of history and there's only a couple of examples of people who thought otherwise. Yet these oddballs are the ones people focus on, despite being a great minority.

This. The radius of the Earth was calculated by Eratosthenes to be some 46.000 km by using the curvature of the Earth and the difference that makes to the angle of incidence of sunlight (the metre was defined at 1/40.000.000th of the Earth's radius originally, but it's about 40.050 km now, depending on where you measure). Also, you can see ships disappear behind the horizon if you watch them sail away from you, which is really hard to explain with a flat Earth, and that would most certainly be known to all the sailing people even five thousand years ago.

 

Additionally, Wikipedia writes this:

Seventeen hundred years after Eratosthenes’ death, while Christopher Columbus studied what Eratosthenes had written about the size of the Earth, he chose to believe that the Earth's circumference was much smaller. Had Columbus set sail knowing that Eratosthenes' larger circumference value was more accurate, he would have known that the place where he made landfall was not Asia, but rather a New World.

You can't underestimate what people knew a long time ago, but it seems rather unlikely that they would have high-end technology and leave absolutely no trace of it. Ask yourself: could we, in any way, manage to disappear without trace, even if we wanted to?

[Sy_Accursed]

The thing I find interesting is these old structures that we 'don't know how they built them' people always seem to leap to amazing lost technologies and such.

 

But they don't mean we don't how they built them in a literal sense of we couldn't do it, it's more to do with the sheer manpower involved to apply the required forces. The basic principles of leverage and such could easily be used to move the rocks etc. it just a staggering number of people would be required to produce the force...but then in a simpler time when people followed commands or were slaves was it so hard to get such great numbers working to one goal as it would be today?

 

I mean I know the odd one or two dumbfound us a bit - eg how they got the crossbeams onto stonehenge, but the vast majority are simply 'we don't know how they did it' because of the sheer numbers required.

[RpgGamer]

Post nuclear winter I imagine a lot of what we have will cease to be. Near every internet or virtual device will be erased of use, but even through infrastructure, a vast number of things now could be left long after us for future life to ponder how the hell we accomplished any of the stuff we did. They could see the American flag on the moon, and one all ripped up on post apocalyptic earth and have no idea how a radio active planet of desolate wasteland somehow got to the moon to put anything there.