From the April 21st edition of the Washington Times:

"Turkish site a neolithic 'supernova' "
"Stone towers reveal pre-agriculture civilization"
"By Nicholas Birch"

"...What makes them remarkable are the carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions that cover them, and their age. Dated at about 9,500 B.C., these stones sre 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge...'Look at this', he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human and half-lion. 'It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt.' "

Read the full article here.

There's been controversy with the timeline in Egypt..
..There's evidence, based on comparison between records in Egypt and records in other parts of the world, that there might be several thousand years unaccounted for !!


For anything like archaeology, palaeontology, etc..
..Much of the information that we have was originally put together and worked out by amateurs - people with money, but no training or much knowledge of the subject matter.
Their views and explanations laid the foundation for much of what we knew, and most of it has never been re-visited to apply modern techniques.

When that happens, new things come to light and there's controversy between longtime held old information vs newly discovers information.


In recent years there have been several discoveries - a maine shaft, with hundreds of bodies from varying periods of Egyptian history
A city under a hill, only discovered by accident by someone flying over it
Burial tombs located near established digs
etc..


All good fun, and all inspiration for RPGs of various types

I just saw something about that the other day, evidently there's some proof the the Nile... stopped working for a couple hundred years and totally boned up the Old Kingdom.

You know, to the point where they were eating their own children to stay alive.

If that isn't fodder for SR/Earthdawn I don't know what is

More archaeological discoveries to inspire your Shadowrun campaign:

Mythical Xibalba Found

Scientists find ancient lost settlements in Amazon

Ancient gold treasure puzzles Greek archaeologists

They are finally finding a lot of egyptian stuff but it's estimated that 80--90% of finds are still covered. The thing is for the longestes time the europeans were looknig for kings and temples and GOLD. it is only the last 20-30 years that serious archelogists have begun looking for living areas, not just tombs. The current minister of antiquities, Hawase I think it's spelled, made his name finding the ruins of a village that housed the craftsmen who worked on the pyramids. painters, scribes and bakers.

This is absolutely mind-blowing stuff.

Anyone ever heard of the Akashic record, or the secret chamber located beneath the foot of the sphinx? Supposedly the record is located there. I believe it was in the past 10 years that a foreign archaeologists located a chamber beneath the paw of the sphinx using crude ultrasound techniques. He and his crew were promptly ejected from Egypt and are not allowed to return. I apologize for not having links to support these statements, because I realize how absurd it sounds. I read about the akashic record, back in the mid '90's, and it's location in several books. I watched a news report on CNN about the chamber under the paw of the sphinx. If your interested, I'm quite certain if you did a little digging you would be able to find it all.

Antikythera Mechanism has a similar mystique

*Thumbs open Augmentation*

What?

Yeah, he actually found it with a master stroke of induction, and it was more than village. He sketched out the number of people it would take to put in the work hours required to build the pyramids. Turns out that it would have taken a city by ancient standards. So he busts out a compass and draws a circle for a half days walk around the pyramids and asks for founding to find the city in that circle.

I have always been amazed by this thing. I often wonder where humanity would be had there been no Dark Age(s).

exactly where we are now. Learning and progress didn't stop. It just flourished in places white people don't like to admit.


That said there are many super cool lost arts that are pretty mind blowing. There was a Sumerian village with number houses, and a water mill that ground flower and pulling a cart along a main street like a trolley. That's not even touching on the batteries, light bulbs, and coca plants found in Egypt. Why didn't this go anywhere? eh who knows.

[snarky]Because genocide's a bitch and we killed them all? [/snarky]

Truthfully, I think it has more to do with cultural elitism. The majority of conquering nations believed that their military advantages showed them as a better people and therefore did not learn anything from the ones they conquered. Other cultural imperatives forced a lack of acceptance or belief that technological improvements were "witchcraft." Europeans learned more from the remnants of Moor libraries in Spain than the libraries in the Holy Land.

All I was trying to point it out is this: Had there been a successive building on prior knowledge from the ancient Greek directly to the present day (white/non-white - I don't care), where would we be? Colonies on Mars, perhaps?

You guys should read The Daily Grail. Daily reports on this stuff.

For a good (and very interesting) look at so-called "modern" technology, including the Antikythera Mechanism and brain surgery, see the two hour History Channel special Ancient Inventions. It is available at www.shophistorychannel.com.

I'll say it again. We would be exactly here because that's what happened. Without Greek, and Indian mathematics Islam couldn't have come up with algebra. With out algebra you can't have calculus. Unbroken chain. Same with pure logic. Newton calls Al'Farabi the final critique of Aristotle. Avicenna also made major contributions lines of thinking started by the Greeks. Similarly the Greeks themselves will tell you that the Egypt out stripped them in many disciplines. Where did that thinking go? I'll give you a hint Egypt speaks Arabic now. If you let go of the whole west vs. east thing you will actually find that not one single discourse was dropped.

Weaver--I think the comment was driven more towards what would happen if we didn't kill each other and had worked to find an answer. If West vs East had never divided the world, would Algebra have turned into calculus a century or more earlier? If Newton had started in the 14th century instead of the 17th, where would we be now in 2008?

You're right that the discourse never stopped, but half the world didn't pay attention to it.

The Antikythera Device may not be as mystical if one knows that in Antikythera at the time was host to a yearly competition in displaying technological and scientific marvels of Greece. Most likely the astrolabe found off the coast could be such a competition piece.

You're mixing two different things-though considering what I've heard of this you're probably sighting a source ocrrectly.
1)the Akashic record is the idea of an super subconscious a race membry of all humanity since we climbed down from the trees. This is the bases of many new age philosophies and was the base of Jung's therapy.

2)the chamber under the Sphinx is open to debate. There is one wacko who is a proponent of it, he also thinks the pyramids were made by Atlanteans/space aliens millenia before when most people say it was done. If you have access to the history Channels "Digging for the Truth" in the first season they do the pyramids and sphinx and address this legend. My guess is your man who was ejected from Egypt tried to do his own digging without a permit.

and thats made the romans quite interesting for europe (and im willing to bet that china got formed in a similar way) as they just as much conqured by cultural assimilation and economy as by force.

beat the current ruler, tell the people that they can keep their gods and so on but also integrate the roman ones into it, then grant them access to the roman market.

only people they really had issues with was the monotheists in a area between greece and egypt, and that was because their "one god" concept didnt mix with the roman pantheon of gods...

if one strip away the religious bit, one could claim that germany, eu, and maybe even usa got formed in a similar way.

as for the china bit up top? iirc, different areas talked different languages until fairly recently. but everyone bowed to the chinese emperor and understood his commands thanks to the written language being concept based rather then sound based.

i makes one wonder if not a one world government could be formed, not by weapons, but by trade...

oh, and about missing parts of egyptian history, no shit!

its been known that history is written by the winner. and there is known actions by the egyption priesthood to wipe out "misbehaving" kings from history...

Actually, the truth is much simpler. Stuff that doesn't have practical use gets lost by the wayside. Hero of Alexandria invented the steam engine in the 1st century AD. He didn't see it as anything more than an expensive toy and thus it is lost for about eighteen-hundred years. Ancient Egyptian lightbulbs? Lightbulbs are a great invention, if you have a reliably electricity generation and distribution apparatus. Without one, they're less than useless. At best, such things were overpriced toys that did what a candle does with twice the danger and several thousand times the cost. Without steam turbines, coal, and a the capacity to build huge network of insulated copper wires, there was no reason to develop the lightbulb further.

Thank you sir. That is what I was trying to ask; although, I didn't do so well.

Smooth linear scientific progress is a myth. Science marches forward in fits and spurts, driven by men of genius who simply happen to be in the right place at the right time and then fade into obscurity after sharing one or two insights that they are never able to eclipse.

The development of Calculus wasn't stymied by a lack of study, people had been attempting to solve these problems for a centuries with little luck, it was mired by unoriginal minds incapable of reaching out and grasping any truth that lies beyond their rigidly defined belief system. All it took was one person with a little bit of inspiration and a willingness to do what conventional wisdom said could not be done. And that is something special that cannot be duplicated with the mere application of more time.

If events had occurred differently, it might be that Gregory and Barlow or Newton and Leibniz are never born or that they never go into mathematics, and the world marches on without calculus at all.

Ok, yeah, if that's where your going cool. And yes your obviously right that less war and more trade could have teched us out to who knows where. What though me into a tizzy was the "successive building on prior knowledge from the ancient Greek directly to the present day". There is still a thriving scholarly concept of the the 'Greek Miracle'. People still argue that Greeks invented rationality and skepticism which languished until Italians dusted them off around 1492.

And yeah what really get's me is the sacking of libraries. Hyzmarca is right that if you don't have infrastructure to support a technology it isn't going to go anywhere. Many of those techniques, and the theory behind them that could lead to easy rediscovery in at a more opportune time were in fact recorded. And burn to the ground. Go us! Though I do tentatively hope humans might actually be past that bit retardness.

Sadly that’s what happens, Hell look at china, they had the clock and gun powered and lots of other things century before Europe but do mine little things like purges and such, that happens fairly often in history that information was lost till the Europeans started using the same tech, Its sad but that’s life. Also take into account that just becouse one nation comes up with an idea dosn't mean those around them will be willing to adapt it, The outlook and mentality of nations and peoples today is far diffrent then they where 100's or thousands of years ago,

A lot of the time it boils down to a world view, Oh and infrastructure, with out that tech and the knowhow to make it is usless,

and funny enough, war can be as much a driving force for technological development as a restriction of it.

hell, i would say that religion or cultural taboos are more of a issue then war.

but then those may fuel or give reason for the war...

if its a economically reasoned war (say a land grab) then one is more likely to take a look at what the cultures defeated have to offer. but if its a cultural/religious war, then its a war of destruction without casting a second glance as the enemy, as that could be considered heretical...

that is unless one get leadership approval to use "the devils" own tools against him...

funny little quirk, most innovation happens in wealth regions that 'have it going on' in terms of both quality of life, and entrenched institutions.The actual implementation of innovation is usually seen in the less stable, adjacent regions that have a power structure weak enough to over throw, access to idea's from the centers of thought, and people who's lives are crap enough they are willing to suck up growing pains. ie. The English and Dutch didn't invent guns, they just teched the hell out of them, and actually equipped armies with them. Democracy wasn't invented in Colonial America, we just had the mean motive and opportunity to do something about it.