Good day all...
"Civilization is older than we suppose," is the principal thesis of this treatise. With the advance of science the concept of the size and age of the universe has been radically changed in the last four hundred years. Farseeing men such as Bruno, Galileo or Darwin defied their narrow-minded contemporaries and argued that the world was greater and more ancient than men had believed.
Two hundred years ago the French naturalist Bufion estimated the age of the earth. He thought that our planet had cooled down 35,000 years ago, and that life had appeared about 15,000 years ago. This chronology of the French scholar was certainly more rational than the general belief in England at the time of the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 that the earth and man were created in 4004 B.C.E.
But geology and Darwinism exploded this mediaeval concept and twenty five years later, Lord Kelvin added ten million years to the terrestrial age. Thanks to perfected techniques the age of the crust has been determined to be 3.3 billion years while that of the planet itself 4.6 billion years. In only two hundred years the age of the earth's crust was raised from 35,000 to 3,300,000,000 years! A few decades ago man was considered to be about 600,000 years old. New finds in South, and East Africa extended the life span of homo sapiens to two million years. The discovery of anthropoid teeth and jaws in southern Ethiopia by the Chicago anthropologist F. Clark Howell confirmed the figure as early as 1969.
A tendency to move back the origin of civilization has been noticeable in the field of history as well. Before Schliemann, no savant in Europe could conceive of Troy existing as early as 2800 B.C.E. Before the excavations of Evans in Crete, no historian had the audacity to imagine a Minoan culture 2,500 years before our era. Four decades ago there was not a scholar in the world who could envisage a high civilization in the Indus Valley co-existing with the early dynasties of Egypt. How many scientists were there a quarter of a century ago who could accept the idea of Central American civilizations having had an uninterrupted existence for 4,000 years? Yet the ruins of the city of Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan are a mute witness to this truth.
The rationale of the conclusion that the origin of man and the appearance of civilization might be less recent than accepted at present, can clearly be seen from the above examples. The mass of historical data presented in this work demonstrates the presence of an archaic science in the past. But who were the teachers of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks from whom we ourselves received a store of knowledge through the Arabs?
Surrounded by the marvels of our technology and science, we are losing contact with the people of former epochs to whom we owe so much. Man is civilized only when he remembers his yesterday and dreams about tomorrow. The primate began to leave the animal kingdom by developing a superior brain and upright posture. He became a true 'man' when he ventured into the domain of abstract thought - religion, mathematics, art and music. The true criterion of man's growth was his ability to soar in the world of ideals; to appreciate beauty, to distinguish between right and wrong, to form abstractions. Until he reached that state, man was still a link between the quadrupeds and the bipeds.
Science, the empirical observation of the world around us, and philosophy, the formulation of generalizations, have helped man to arrive at more correct views concerning the universe. The history of civilization is the story of the ascent of man in the mental World. It was William Prescott, the great Americanologist, who said: "A nation may pass away and leave only the memory of its existence, but the stories of science it has gathered up will endure forever."
Have you, like the author, walked around the pyramids of Giza awed by the giant size of the stones and amazed by the thinness of the joints between them? Have you stood in Mexico City before the paintings of Quetzalcoatl flying in a winged ship, startled by this prehistoric notion of aviation? Have you seen canoes with stabilizers in the Pacific and admired the islanders who have made ocean voyages for thousands of years?
Have you strolled through the slumbering city of Pompeii and examined the bricks with in crusted gravel, like modern concrete, which the Roman slaves made? Have you visited the shrine inside the colossal bronze Buddha in Kamakura, Japan, and marveled at the skill of Japanese metallurgists seven hundred years ago? Have you walked around the megaliths of Stonehenge and tried to solve a riddle - how men wearing skins could have designed and erected this computer in stone?
If you have, then you would want to follow the author on a sight-seeing trip to the land of the past. This book is about real people, actual places and authentic events. What is more, it is about the things our predecessors thought and dreamed about a long time ago. During the past three or four hundred years science has been rediscovered rather than discovered. Babylon, India, Egypt, Greece and China were the cradle of science.
"The old devices have been re-invented; the old experiments have been tried once more," said Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. This book is about penicillin before Fleming, about aeroplanes before the Wright Brothers, about the moons of Jupiter before Galileo, about voyages to the moon before Apollo probes, about the atomic theory centuries before Rutherford, about electric batteries before Volta, about computers before Wiener, about science before this Scientific Age.
A fragmentary account of the adventures of ancient man in the scientific realm is not a history of science. But this sketch will reveal unorthodox historical facts of educational value, provoke speculation as to the reasons for the presence of advanced scientific and technological concepts in early civilizations, or at least entertain the reader by a story stranger than fiction.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2023/05/part-1-we-are-not-first-days-and-nights.html
