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Jim Davidson's avatar

There are extensive reasons to believe that previous human civilisations reached much higher than was common in the 17th Century. Graham Hancock does a good job of going over many of these, but you will excuse me for not liking his evident Gnostic tendencies with reference to God as "the demi-urge."

One of the books I read when I was eleven was Homer's The Iliad. In it, you will find Homer's description of Aegis, the shield of Achilles, given to him by Athena. The shield has motion pictures on it. Which is odd, if you think of Homer as a bard for goat herds and crude mariners of 800 BC. But it is consistent with Plato's view that Greek civilisation was an effort to return to former glory and that a golden age, thousands of years earlier had existed. Also in The Iliad is a description of a wedding feast for which Haephaestus has built golden dancing girls out of metal - robots. There are also robotic serving carts which move from divan to divan to serve the guests of the feast.

Plato puts a number on the crash of that previous high civilisation. He says that his ancestor Solon, who was in Egypt roughly 600 BC was told by the Egyptians there that a great cataclysm had flooded the world 9,000 years earlier. So roughly 11,600 years ago. In the Critias and Timaeus, Plato calls this previous high civilisation "Atlantis." He also describes it as brutal, hierarchical, and ugly in many ways.

Graham Hancock points out that the Edfu building texts were obviously put on the walls of the Edfu temple because they were important. They describe a cataclysm that drowned an entire continent and from which the survivors came to Egypt. Hancock says these are refugees from Atlantis.

Hancock also points to "Meltwater Pulse B" which happens at the end of the Younger Dryas era roughly 11,800 years ago. At that time, based on extensive geological evidence, something like a comet hit the ocean and scarred the crust so that there was a prolonged exposure of magma. So much sea water boiled so rapidly that enormous clouds of steam went up into the sky, raising global air temperatures for about six weeks (forty days and forty nights). During that time, the Cordilleran, European, and Laurentide ice sheets melted, raising sea levels by about 400 feet.

Since today about 90% of the population lives within a hundred miles of the sea, we can imagine how few survivors were around to rebuild. The epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah in the Bible give similar accounts of few survivors.

God is quite clear in Genesis, the account of creation and the early days of mankind that Moses put in the Pentateuch. God flooded the world because mankind were very wicked. And God put a rainbow in the sky so people would know that God doesn't intend to flood the world again. Next time it's fire.

There are enormous monuments to some previous high civilisation, or perhaps more than one, all over the world. We know from genetic information that Minoan people sailed across the Atlantic and mined copper from the region of the Great Lakes about 4,000 years ago. And somebody, some time in the past, decided that the great big teddy-bear looking Giant Panda should be a bamboo eating vegetarian. Whoever that was didn't bother altering the DNA for its teeth, because the Giant Panda has the teeth of a carnivore even though it has no meat in its diet.

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paesean's avatar

>there are excellent reasons for believing a much greater age of the universe

I recommend Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse" with Granham Hancock for consideration about the age of human civilization. 10 years ago today I was in Peru preparing for a 5 day hike on the Inca Trail; summited Machu Picchu on June 21st/'13! My first hand observation of that site was there is likely lost/forgotten human civilizations; the Incas didn't build from scratch; they built atop of an earlier civilization's structures.

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