I figured I should add something to my 'Ancient History'
category, since I went to the trouble of creating it.
I've been interested in ancient history, and ancient
civilizations in particular, ever since I was a kid. Originally, I
was fascinated with Egypt, but as I got older I learned about
Sumer, and Babylon, and Chichen Itza, and other ancient cities
around the globe.
Then a funny thing happened... it started to seem obvious to me
that the civilizations that built these cities seemed to have a lot
in common, both in their architecture and mythology. I started
looking into that, and I found out that we really don't know how
they built the things they built, and that we couldn't duplicate
their structures with modern equipment, let alone the kind of
technology we suspect they had to work with. Furthermore, when they
wrote about how they built stuff, especially the really big stuff,
they just said that the gods helped them.
The Sumerians, considered to be the first of the ancient
civilizations, just popped up out of nowhere. One day they were
nomads living in tents, and the next day they were building huge
and sophisticated cities, with complex plumbing and drainage
systems, surrounded by huge irrigated farms. How this transition
happened seems like a big mystery, except that the Sumerians are
pretty clear about it: they wrote that the gods showed up one day
and showed them how to build cities.
This is what really fascinates me about ancient civilizations:
they all seem to stem from more ancient, and not generally
recognized, civilizations. Yes, I'm talking about Atlantis, but
there were two others as well.
I won't get into all of the details, but from everything I've
read it seems that during the last ice age, around 10000 years ago,
there were three large and advanced civilizations in the world.
Atlantis, either in the Atlantic ocean or possibly the northernmost
pennisula of Antarctica, Mu, in the south Pacific, and the ancient
Rama Empire civilization in India, which wrote the Vedas.
The Vedas talk about these civilizations, and wars between them;
echos of those stories appear in mythology around the world. So
does the 'Flood' story, which seems like it relates to the end of
the ice age, when sea levels rose, the Mediterranean plains became
the Mediterranean sea, and any large cities, which would have been
mostly on coastlines, would have been destroyed.
Why don't we have more physical evidence of these civilizations?
We have a lot actually, but it's not generally recognized by
scholars. But the really good stuff, the big cities, would all be
underwater now, on the edges of the contenental shelves. A lot of
that has probably been lost due to landslides from the shelf edges
into the adjoining rifts, but there should still be something left
to discover.
So that's why I want to be an archeologist: I think there are
major discoveries just sitting out there, waiting for someone to
come looking. If I pursued this, I would get myself a nice boat,
some side-scanning sonar equipment, scuba gear, maybe an ROV, and
go searching around the northern Carribean and Bahamas area. At the
very least, it'd be a nice lifestyle down there.
Or maybe I should just try to build a Vimana.
