I’m often asked why we don’t know our forgotten history. There are so many reasons why we don’t know our own history. It’s impossible to attribute our amnesia to any one cause. Therefore, I’ve put together a list of reasons why we don’t know our forgotten history.
1) The Complexities of Languages
Languages are ever changing and evolving. Some words of multiple meanings while there are also multiple words for the same concept. The meanings of specific terms can differ from one generation to the next or region to the next. The world is always changing and so languages must change with it. Just look at the different terms a language adopts in a ten-year time span. Now if one decade can change that much, imagine how much it changed over a century or millennium.
If we met a person from a hundred or a thousand years ago would be able to communicate? Probably not very well. Sure, we have written texts that give us some idea of how the language was spoken. However, written text is interpreted by the reader. Do you ever come across an old book and fumble through some of the paragraphs?
It isn’t just that the meanings of certain terms change over time, but also the terms themselves. Words die and are born. A newly made-up word is called a neologism. Sometimes these words are coined because we’ve forgotten the original term once used for what we’re describing. Words that aren’t used from one generation to the next are eventually forgotten.
2) There are Many Different Languages
One single language can not only change over time, even branch off into multiple new languages. We already have so many different languages, but as time goes by those languages develop different regional dialects and terms. Eventually they become separate languages altogether.
After thousands of years there can be several languages that stem from one ancient root language. However, all the languages may be so different from one another and from the root language that translation becomes difficult at best.
After thousands of years there are no native speakers left to help us decipher the ancient root dialects and forgotten terms. Which means modern interpreters are really just doing their best guessing using modern references. Although a modern term might seem similar to a term from the ancient root language it might not even be close in meaning.
3) Lack of Context
The world is also very different now than what is was ten years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and certainly thousands of years ago. So not only might the terms differ, but also concepts, practices, physical every day household items, and of course the environments.
Just like ancient cultures would not likely have terms for our smartphones and computers, we lack the understanding and vocabulary of their common items. Archeologists might discover a tool and find no reference material to help determine the purpose or name. So, they may theorize the purpose and give it a new name accordingly.
Even when a reference or an already translated term is found, remember terms can have multiple meanings and therefore be misinterpreted. For example, many ancient cultures had a term for serpent. Although linguists and archeologists may have identified the term in a culture, they may not have considered its other possible interpretations.
The snake represents many things in almost all ancient cultures including life, wisdom, beauty, and arrogance. It also often represents water. So, when a scholar translates an ancient historical text that describes two large serpents cutting through the land it’s often categorized as myth. However, what if the text is in fact historically accurate, but in this context the term serpent also means river?
4) Personal Beliefs and Religious Influences
Remember the translations we go by today come from the interpretation or interpretations of others. Those interpretations can be influenced by the personal beliefs of those doing the translating. Unfortunately, this has happened often throughout history and continues to happen today.
One example might be someone who believes in angels misinterpreting depictions of flying people as such. Or someone who believes aliens visited us long ago misinterpreting an unknown ancient flying device as an alien spaceship. This is why you must put your personal beliefs aside, look for more references and clues, and consider all possibilities.
While some of these misinterpretations may be accidental due to bias, others were intentional. For example, at one time it was forbidden for the Bible to published in any other language than Latin because the Vatican felt only the Catholic church had the right to interpret the Bible. Everyone who reads the Bible now finds their own meanings in the text.
Also one way to eradicate a culture or religion you don’t agree with is to destroy their written texts and references and provide your own. They say history is written by the victor. That’s because if a religious war is waged the victor might erase all evidence of the losing culture’s belief system. This is why we don’t have the full history of the Canaanites.
Religious leaders also add, remove or change text to fit their own needs. The concept of hell did not originally exist in the Bible. Also, suicide was not originally a sin. The Catholic church added these concepts because too many worshipers were committing suicide in the hope of getting to heaven. Admittedly this probably saved many lives considering the death toll of the time.
5) Politics
Just like religious leaders, politicians throughout history have tried to control information for their own purposes. One common example is how many governments only report what makes them look good to their people during war times. They don’t often admit to the evils they committed. Every country commits atrocities in war.
Politicians also keep information from the public in order to avoid scrutiny when spending public funds, panic when there’s a crisis, or violence and discrimination when an international incident occurs. Some motives of selfish and detestable while others may be for good intentions, but changing or omitting information still impacts historical records.
6) We Might Not Be as Intelligent as Past Cultures
We like to think that we have a better understanding of things and better technologies and practices than ancient societies. That might not be true. Perhaps we don’t our forgotten history because we CAN’T identify and translate lost languages. There may be all kinds of recorded history right in front of our noses that we don’t recognize as written language.
There are many symbols that we do acknowledge as communication and we are still trying to understand them. However, what if there are many more symbols that we’ve missed? Some might just look like weathering or damage from presumed ancient conflicts. Some ancient cultures crafted amazing things that we still cannot recreate today. It’s entirely possible they were more intelligent than we are now. They may have hidden their written histories in some of their creations.
Many ancient cultures also seem to have had a better understanding of math and astrology than we do now. They may have had languages based in either subject. Scientists and scholars associate so many of the mathematical wonders and astrological depictions and references to mythologies or belief systems. What if there are hidden written languages and histories within these depictions that we can’t yet understand?
7) Too Many Retellings
Have you ever played the secret game? You start off telling one person a secret and that person tells it to another who tells it to another and by the time it gets back to you it’s been completely changed. Well the same thing can happen with history.
Much of the history before 3-6 thousand years ago is nothing more than legends. The legend of Atlantis was just a story mentioned in one of Plato’s writings. He supposedly heard the story from the Egyptians. Right there you have at least one retelling AND a translation from Egyptian to Greek in which many terms and references could have been mistranslated.
It’s also possible that a little embellishing occurred. Plato also may have heard a story in Egypt that inspired a fictional story with the purpose of teaching a philosophical lesson. We have no definitive written history of Atlantis. After all these years of searches and theories the waters have become so muddied, so to speak, that finding anything beyond speculation may be impossible.
Other retellings throughout the ancient past have made it just as difficult to find the facts in other supposed historical events. There are now. so many variations of the Bible which would have already been difficult to decipher. It was originally written by several men from different religions who gathered the stories of the surrounding areas, translated and interpreted them, and then together decided what stories and which versions of those stories made it in.
8) The Combined Consequences
The thousands of years of the combined seven factors previously listed has culminated into global amnesia. Today we all argue about historical events, disregard and/or destroy anything from the past we don’t like, and have little interest or respect for history.
Many think history is a constant, never changing subject that has already happened and we’ve already covered it. But we are constantly discovering forgotten tidbits. Whenever we find a previously unknown piece of the past it changes history. For years it was believed that the earliest human societies existed around six thousand years ago. When carbon dating was performed on recovered organic material from Gobekli Tepe our historical record doubled to at least twelve thousand years.
When you consider how little is actually preserved through time it’s astonishing that we can uncover buried sites even from just twelve to six thousand years ago. Imagine just how much further back our forgotten history might go. How many languages, religions, technologies, and civilizations might have been completely eroded by time and erased from history forever?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/
For more historical speculation check out https://alienanatomytheorycrafting.com/articles/
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