Look at the fringes…..
The dogma of modern disciplines illustrates that not only “history is written by the victors”.
There were so many starting points for this weeks blog that I wasn’t really sure how to begin, so I’ll start with where my own personal journey started with my fascination of all things ancient Egyptian.
As a much younger man I was intrigued by the highly colourful and hugely detailed artefacts that were associated with the great Egyptian Pharoahs, from the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun to the detailed drawing and depictions on the walls I once believed to have been in the pyramids. It was many years later that I realized that no Pharoah had been buried inside a pyramid and no pyramid had wall art associated with it. They were all buried under ground, in locations such as the valley of the kings. Most of the wall art you see are either associated with these burial centres or with the ancient temples that have survived.
So if no one was buried in them and they weren’t decorated to indicate any kind of ceremonial use, what on earth were the pyramids built for? This started a rather long search for many answers about the ancient world, after all, as modern human beings we believe the ancients to be somewhat backwards in comparison - and this is the road down which so many of my early assumptions happily travelled, many of them not surviving the journey.
If I couldn’t find the answers in Egypt, I thought I’d go even further back to understand where these ancient peoples were coming from. My next journey stop through the history books was Mesopotamia and the birth of documented human history. The Sumerians and Akkadians dominated this part of the ancient world, now described as the “fertile crescent” around 4,000BC - an even earlier primitive civilization.
No one is really sure where these civilizations sprang up from, they seem to have appeared complete with technologies such as the wheel, the plough, writing, literature, laws, agricultural methods, mathematics, an understanding of time and much more. In fact, our 60 second minute and 60 minute hour to measure time all date back to ancient Mesopotamia. They even made beer. Normally these developments would be seen to evolve over many generation or even centuries, however such evidence was clearly lacking.
These peoples did not live in mud huts or small villages, we have examples of cities with up to 80,000 people in them, as you might imagine, at this point I am beginning to wonder if my imagination of ancient peoples was even vaguely accurate. Numerous historians have tried to explain the sudden appearance and rise of these ancient peoples with the tools and capabilities of a much more modern race.
This is further complicated by the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey. Excavations have discovered a series of circular chambers with megaliths assembled into T-shapes consisting of stone blocks weighing 10-20 tons with further examples in a local stone quarry of 50 tons - an incredible feat for ancient peoples, especially when you consider the site has been carbon dated to around 10,000BC. Unlike many other historical megalithic sites, this was intentionally buried after it had been used, which has preserved carbon based materials enabling it to be accurately dated. These megalithic structures and carvings have been associated with other ancient megalithic sites across the globe, and have common themes running through them - for more information I’d point the interested reader to the work of Graham Hancock, such as his TedTalk below from 2016.
Skipping forward several centuries, we also have the incredible discovery of the Baghdad battery from 250BC, clearly a functioning method of generating electricity 2,000 years before Benjamin Franklin began flying kites in thunderstorms. What I find more disconcerting is not that batteries may have been invented far earlier than we thought, the question is why? What on earth would an ancient person need electricity for? There is, after all, only one reason you would build a battery in the first place. . .
So why are we not updating our history books? What about megalithic structures found all over the world that as modern people we are unable to replicate them today? At some point in our history we lost many of what we would call technologies today. We should be grateful to the brave historians and geologists whose careers were put on the line to bring these ideas and understandings of our past to light - careers were ruined for standing up to the current dogma, regardless of the evidence.
If you believe this applies only to our historical or geological sciences, then I would suggest that you broaden that horizon - much of what we think as cutting edge sciences are riddled with such dogmas and held as beliefs rather than scientific principles that can be tested. Creative scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake have worked hard against the current dogmas of modern science, about consciousness and the world around us. Much of his work I would describe as challenging, based more on how we have been educated rather than whether his ideas and theories are worthy of scientific enquiry. I’ve also included his TedTalk on the science delusion - a humorous and educational look at some of the thought processes hampering modern science, from 2013.
Our breakthrough thinkers and inventions have been achieved through questioning the assumptions we have been taught that underlie how the world works. I am not suggesting that every ancient thought and approach are superior to how we think and work today, just that we live in a world where we believe what we are taught or told, rather than questioning those beliefs to gain a deeper understanding of our world, from the physical to the experiential. Such understandings underlie our deeply human individuality and it is rare to find like minded people who share beliefs and experiences - our current social media based world actually allows more of these exchanges of information and ideas than ever before. It saddens me to think that such free ideas and approaches remain under threat from authoritarian regulation, such freedoms of thought expression we have are likely to be curtailed over the next few decades without positive action to protect them.
Not all users of these platforms act with mankind’s best interests at heart, I understand that but if we are educated appropriately then it is up to us to regulate what we believe and what we do not. Without proper enquiry we can never update and further our understanding of the world around us and more importantly about ourselves.
My analogy would be that parents continue to send their children to school, knowing full well that children can be cruel as well as kind to each other but also understanding that the education and social learnings are what our children need to survive and flourish in the world. The benefit clearly outweighs the risk. If we limit which ideas and information we allow our citizens to be exposed to, we remove the chance that they will grow to be able to think for themselves.
