Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age
This week’s book was an Amazon suggestion a while back off of my purchase of some Graham Hancock books, making it Forgotten Civilization: New Discoveries on the Solar-Induced Dark Age by Robert M. Schoch, PhD and Catherine Ulissey.
I am not quite sure what I expected with this book. Ok, that’s not quite true, I was expecting a lot more civilization and a lot less this is what ruined prior civilizations. Now, while it wasn’t what I was expecting, it was still quite good, and I learned some interesting things.
The book starts at Easter Island and a discussion of the Moai and Rongorongo script. There are, I don’t know, a dozen different ancient scripts that have not been translated, and Rongorongo is one of them. There are many reasons for this, most of them come down to colonization destroyed the native culture on the island, leaving no one who may have been able to translate them alive to do so. However, Schoch independently of a group of physicists at Los Alamos National Labs led by Anthony Peratt, realized that this might not be a script at all. Rongorongo looks a lot like petroglyphs left behind by ancient people around the globe. Peratt has written on this extensively, and Schoch summed up in this book, that the petroglyphs and rongorongo look like what plasma displays as seen in solar bursts, a la the borealis, look like.
Schoch revisits his hypothesis that the Sphinx was originally built when Egypt was a hell of a lot more damp than it currently is. Now, this is what I THOUGHT the book was about, and while he doesn’t go into great detail on it, that is covered more in his book Origins of the Sphinx, which I have not read, and I thought was the Schoch book I bought, but clearly not. However, he touched on his hypothesis here and he makes good points. It certainly helps that he has his PhD in geology, so if anyone would be able to identify what water off a stone looks like, it would be a professional geologist. So he posits the Sphinx was built about 7000 to 5000 years BCE.
And he revisits that the established archeologists stick to the party line that the Sphinx is only as old as Khafre, so approximately 4500 years ago, or 2500 BCE. And part of the reason they are so certain that the Sphinx cannot be as old as Schoch claims is that there is no proof of any civilization that old. And there wasn’t. Until Gobleki Tepe. Which, as covered in depth by Graham Hancock, is pretty definitive proof of SOME level of civilization around 9500 BCE.
Schoch moves into what exactly IS civilization. Which is a fair question. How can we say it’s never existed before, if we can’t define what IT is. So cities top the list. Large settlements where people live together, which allow for full time specialists in various fields, craftsmen, doctors, food produces, priests. Those who are not priestly classes pay a tithe to the “church” whatever that may mean to the people involved. Monumental public buildings…like Gobekli Tepe, for example. The people have to be stable enough to be able to build such monuments. If they’re not engaged in producing the food, they are supported by those producers while providing services of their own, not simply trade, but we get a rise in a bureaucratic class, civil and military leaders, a ruling class. Written language is seen as proof of civilization. Rise in the arts, foreign trade, and specialist craftsmen. So these are the things which equal a civilization.
I know I said it before, but I would ask those who insist this is the list that proves a culture is civilized, how that list jives with the native tribes of America….and watch them squirm. Since tribes like the Cherokee didn’t have a written language until the 19th century, after they had contact with European colonizers.
And he makes the case that Gobleki Tepe and the Sphinx are proof of those civilizations. So what happened to them. Here’s where the book went into a lot of speculation. Good speculation. He pulls on massive scientific texts to back up his hypothesis on what happened. And it all revolves around the Younger Dryas, and the sun.
Now, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis was explored in some of Graham Hancock’s books. And I assumed it was named after Younger-Dryas who formulated the theory. Shows what I know. It actually refers to a specific point in geological history, from the time the last ice age started, approximately 10,900 years BCE, and ended abruptly… I mean scientists have almost nailed down the exact DAY it ended…9,700 years BCE.
And while he does not believe it was a comet that impacted the earth and led to the end of the Younger Dryas, he believes it may have been cataclysmic solar bursts that led to end of the period. And he provides some pretty compelling arguments to support his belief, explaining what exactly happened with the Carrington Event in the 19th century, and how a LARGER Carrington Event could shut the planet down. And pulls some of his supporting documents from some surprising places. Like, the Bible. Now, I don’t discount this out of hand. While I may not agree the Bible is THE word of god, I do believe the bible was written by man, and likely it’s testimony and stories related orally until the means to write them down occurred. Like Aesop’s fables. I think there are some outstanding morality lessons provided in the bible, even though I am not a Christian. I also find it fascinating that those same people who would say civilization starts with writing, will exclude one of our oldest foundational texts simply because of the god angle.
He considers the multitude of flood myths that are globally provided. Like, all cultures have flood myths, a lot of them passed down orally, until writing for that culture existed. I don’t think writing is the be all end all of civilization. I think if you limit proof of civilization to writing, you cut off large chunks of the world who didn’t develop on Europe’s timeline. That does not make them any less civilized and one could argue they were a hell of a lot more civilized than Europeans who slaughtered people wholesale for the audacity of worshipping a different god.
He included a rather interesting appendix at the end, one that addresses politics, money, and science, pointing out that if you want to know where science is going, follow the money. And money flows from political power. He had other interesting appendices, but that one made me smile, because…well…. hard to argue with that these days.
I did enjoy this book; it gave me food for thought and gave me lots of ideas to turn over in my head.
