[adidoit]

This is fantastic. I'm reminded of the Samo Burja thesis that civilization is actually a lot older when we think and ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.

With better imaging, tooling, and archaeological funding, I'm sure we'll find much more evidence like this

So many countries bronze and ancient ages are underexplored

[SilverElfin]

> ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.

I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know.

But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world.

I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.

[hshdhdhj4444]

> that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.

No one is reposting findings that confirm exactly what archeologists already knew on HN.

Every archeologist wants to be the one that has the dig that revolutionizes the whole field.

The idea that historians and archeologists aren’t curious about the stuff they’re dedicating most of their life to simply doesn’t add up and match with what we know about human beings.

The reason we think what we do (with adjustments for normal human errors), is because that’s the evidence we have.

None of the evidence is secret. If there was some evidence that is being misinterpreted due to Abrahamic biases, there are as many if not more archeologists ans historians from non Abrahamic countries like China, India and most African nations, that have access to the same evidence and could write a paper today about how the evidence is being misinterpreted.

[lmf4lol]

I see the same thinking in philosophy. We know a lot about the great thinkers of the West, from Plato to Aristoteles, to Jesus, to Thomas van Acquin, to Descartes, to Kant, to Hegel, to Nietsche, to Heidegger, to Foucoult, and so on... Its one western-european based lineage. And many of the western philosophers were supremacists indeed. They saw western philosophy as the pinaccle of human thought. The most advanced way of reasoning and understanding . This mindset obviously got them trapped.

But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy. There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).