Posted on 10/02/2016 1:44:14 PM PDT by LouieFisk
History is full of mysterious disappearances of people, of places and even of entire civilizations. In many cases, time has not told us what happened to the populations that have vanished en masse, all over the world. Archeologists unearth ruins and uncover clues as to the demise of ancient cultures, but the fates of many inexplicably evaporated peoples remain question marks. Here are four mysteriously vanished civilizations that keep scientists scratching their heads.
(Excerpt) Read more at mic.com ...
Yeah, natural disaster was in the Med. Sea. Earth Quake. tidal wave. Villages near the shore were wiped out. St. Louis. Huge flood wiped out the 40,000 people. Drought or flood. Or poor sanitation with lots of bad germs will depopulate a city. A side note: 700 BC the Nubians of Africa had tetracycline naturally occurring in the soil. They made beer with the antibiotic and had good health.
Ours is about to end and we know who done it.
Easter Island: they were busy chopping down the big trees to build huge outrigger canoes for deep sea fishing. Yes good for the economy. They forgot to plant new trees. They chopped down trees to use as rollers to move the big huge stone slabs. Then they eventually chopped down all of the big trees. After their fleet of deep sea canoes was obsolete from old age, they had no more trees to convert into new canoes. The economy fell apart and degenerated into gang warfare and chaos. And all of that happened before Captain Cook arrived.
I’m not sure the wheel would have been that useful to them They lacked dry flat terrain and the availability of beasts of burden. It’s also possible the Mayans did have the wheel since the Aztecs had it. Used it for toys.
Hence the Western Civ vs. muzzies thing
A great civilization buried beneath East St. Louis? Talk about cultural regression!
My late father, who was from the Kirksville, MO, area, had a great story about a bar in East St. Louis called “Down the Hatch.”
There are some records from a much later period in the Greek alphabet but in a non-Greek language found at Praisos in eastern Crete--clearly a remnant of the pre-Greek population of Greek was still holding out there (but I think the records are pretty few and don't provide a lot of information--the language is called Eteo-Cretan).
Thanks, very interesting.
I have always thought Crete was the most fascinating place on earth. Despite my interest I will admit I never really studied it seriously.
I read a great novel a few years back titled “Waking The Moon”, by Elizabeth Hand. It was about this secret society of men called the Benandetti or something similar. Their job was to prevent the Moon Goddess from awakening and taking over the world.
She originated on Crete and a beautiful young girl named Angelica, turned out to be the chosen one.
LOL,funny...
I’ve visited (with a archeology class) the mound at Moundsville which is the largest conical mound in the US. It and some of the famous mounds in Ohio were built by the same people. I never got around to seeing the others but it’s on my bucket list!
“Hence the Western Civ vs. muzzies thing”
It’s very telling that Muzzies having been born next to the cradle of civilizations and conquering some of the great ones have been almost immune to being civilized.
Neat! I started studying Spanish in Kindergarten, and I’d love to see the Maya (or Aztec, or Toltec, or Zapotec) sites, but if it’s an either/or, I’ll go to Rome first!
And if I don’t go anywhere, I had video.
That’s pretty much my (simple) analysis too.
Moslems have had civilization: post-conquest Persia, Egypt, Turkey, Spain. Moslems practically invented civilization in Spain. It doesn’t make their religion anything but execrable, but you can say that about Maya or Aztec religion, too.
We have to get away from associating “civilization” with something we consider morally positive. It just means, “a fair number of people living pretty close together with some organization.”
I wonder what would happen if archeologists examined Ferguson, Missouri TODAY!?
I don't blame them for "getting out of Dodge." It beat starving.
A church in Heraklion has a skull which is supposedly that of St. Titus, who was sent to Crete by St. Paul.
St. Paul warns Titus that the Cretans are always liars, and quotes a line from the Cretan poet Epimenides to that effect--"as one of their own poets has said. This testimony is true." But if Epimenides was a Cretan, was he lying when he said that?
There are also some interesting remains from the period of Venetian rule. I was in Heraklion in December 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis. A Kurd from Iran (who had a Greek wife) came up to me and asked me why there were Persian lions on the wall. I tried to explain to him that they were Venetian lions but he had no idea what Venice was so it was hopeless. That was near Kazantzakis' grave.
The first three are the Oriental Asian descendants...I mis-wrote because I wrote too fast. I think they left their native lands because they saw no hope in staying put. The Easter Island folks came too far west, though, and landed on an ISLAND, which doomed them. They ran out of everything.
The Minoans were incredible. Hard to believe that they knew so much so long ago. But, even they bowed to the "bigger stick" of the Mycenaean Greeks.
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