Public baths? Municipal swimming pool? We’ll never know.
The end of any year is a time for reflection. Historical reflection is allowed.
Imagine a real civilization with hundreds of cities, millions of people, international trade, fine architecture… about which we today know virtually nothing: a civilization so totally erased from history that not the name of even a single one of its people has come down to us.
https://leeduigon.com/2011/05/31/erased-from-history/
Think about it. The Indus Valley civilization. The names of its rulers and artists, its cities, its gods–all lost. We cannot read their writing. Surely the Sumerians, with whom they traded, should have written about them; but if they did, we haven’t found it. Not one voice, not even one, speaks to us for the Indus Valley people. One look at their buildings is enough to convince us of their greatness. But buildings don’t talk. Not when you can’t read the inscriptions.
Think about it.
I could make a joke about the inscriptions being indecipherable to moderns because they were written in cursive, but the death of a civilization is too sad to make jokes about.
I hadn’t thought of that!
Frustrating, though. In one of the best-preserved public buildings, there’s a very big, beautiful poster of some kind, made of glazed tiles–and we don’t know what it says!
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
MEANING? SOME REMNENTS FROM THE PAST ARE AWASH IN OBSCURITY!
“Did God erase them from history because of some sin so monstrous that it could not be recorded?
Did they reach a point in their history when they came to doubt the goodness of their own country, and to despise themselves?
Did their leaders pursue policies so ruinous, so absurd, as to leave their civilization with no witness but its own deserted cities?”
One wonders, indeed. According to my understanding of the biblical flood, no trace of the world before that time would be likely to exist. The Flood was not just rain, it included the opening of the “vast watery deeps”, which sounds like seismic activity would have had to have been involved. Actually, that makes great sense to me, because floating on the surface of the water would have been a very protected place to have been. Without shorelines, tidal waves would not have been likely, so the ark could have ridden out these events in relative calm.
If my conclusions are correct, that would mean that all traces of the preflood world are forever gone, subducted into the earth’s mantle and likely reverted to their base elements. This would also mean that anything we discover now came from developments since The Flood.
We know that God did erase some civilizations completely. Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind. https://www.jewsnews.co.il/2018/12/23/archaeologists-confirm-sodom-and-gomorrah-were-literally-destroyed-by-fire-and-brimstone-falling-from-the-sky.html
In that case, God’s judgment was obvious and both Lot and Abraham witnessed these events. But the Bible confines its narratives mostly to the Middle East and we simply do not know what may have happened in other places. I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if God may have acted in other places, but there’s no information available from biblical sources. I believe that evil frequently carries its penalty with it. Live a morally disgusting life and one will usually suffer in the long run.
Whatever is depicted in the photo above, it had to have been a large enterprise. Most likely, some sort of worship was involved. Perhaps it was depraved worship of a false god. The worship of Moloch certainly caused depravity in its wake. Perhaps it will be revealed at the Restitution of all Things.
When I think about it, it leads my thoughts to the civilization that existed before the Flood. Some say hundreds of millions of people could have been on the Earth at the time. We do have some genealogies and a little history about it in the bible, but nothing about what life was like. Methuselah lived almost 1,000 years but we don’t anything about his house, his career, etc. Some say the true traditions of Halloween go back to the early descendants of Noah remembering the dead of the Pre-Noah Flood civilization.
The Bible tells us that Methuselah lived 969 years, but didn’t do much with his life. From this, I will use modern profiling techniques to fill in the gaps.
Methuselah rose to middle management, where his career stalled. He had a McMansion, but could barely afford the payments. His car was an aging Prius with an unprepared dent in the fender. 🙂
As in the days of Noah, so shall the days of the Son of Man be.
Kind of an eerie thought, that…
I have great interest in the antediluvian world, but I am content to let our Creator information. It was an entirely different civilization and we have no idea of how it was developed. We think of the olde world as being devoid of technology, but most of what we have today is fairly recent. If we went from the invention of the telephone to where we are now in something on the order of 150 years, the pre-Flood world would have had plenty of time to advance. Remember, they do not have the hinderence of Babel, so their learned men would have been able to collaborate. With collaboration comes rapid advancement.
I have heard that some Halloween customs date back to the Flood, as well. It sounds feasible, but it could just as easily be a fabricated notion. There are no details of this elaborated in scripture. We do, however, know that the world of that time was filled with badness. Apparently there was great violence and this ruined the earth in God’s sight. I’ve heard all sorts of opinions about what that life was like, but no one knows for sure. It’s quite possible that we are happier not knowing.
It’s so tantalizing! One of the problems with archeology is that stuff just doesn’t last forever. So many gaps in our knowledge.
If it’s “wired in,” then why did it apparently take civilization so long to get started? And if it’s not wired in, then how did it get started at all?
A couple of thoughts on that. God confused the languages at Babel and derailed their attempts to build a civilization of their own making and in opposition to God’s command to fill the earth. That was also when God started a civilization which carries on to this day.
Abram was a man of decency that came out of indecency. He was given a promise to become the patriarch of a people and that group was placed in a covenant relationship with God Almighty. This gave them a law which required cleanliness, avoidance of certain foods (which are now known to pose a health risk of improperly prepared) and the law contained moral direction. It was a law unique in its time, but many feel that many of the precepts of modern Western civilization derive directly from the law of ancient Israel. BTW, that law forbade the capture of slaves and protected women from rape; both of which were innovative at the time.
All civilizations organize around something, some central concept or source of power. The civilization of ancient Israel was built around worship of the One True God and the exclusion of all other gods. While it’s had its ups and downs, it, and the civilizations devised from it have still bred more success and human dignity than any other.