Just wondering what passes the test of time? I personally have an old Casio watch and if you count fruit trees, those are pretty old too.
Just wondering what passes the test of time? I personally have an old Casio watch and if you count fruit trees, those are pretty old too.
The foundation of the building I live in is from the 1880’s. Does that count?
1640s here!
What, it’s not built on a Roman wall? Boooring. /s
It’s crazy to me how commonplace truly deep history is over the pond. Like, there’s been multiple different cities in the same place at different times, basically.
I’m equally fascinated by the idea that the American peoples were there for so many thousand years with such dynamic cultures without a similar built environment. Little physical trace but an immense history
Edit: dammit, this was a week ago. I’m not great at conversation!
No worries.
Yep. Australian too. And then there’s ancient civilisations that are now poorly attested, but definitely were just as happening as other things around. The Cucuteni-Trypillians come to mind; they had the largest city on Earth at one point, but then that whole pocket of complexity - their whole world - faded out completely, and ended up named after where we found some buried ruins. Similarly, we have to assume the Parthian Empire was just as literate and culturally rich as their rival Rome, but because papyrus doesn’t usually last and they didn’t spawn successor factions like the Church and Byzantium, their works are lost.
There are ancient native sites around my area (they did build!), and they can be kinda cool, but we basically have no idea what the people who built them were like, or how many waves of migration and replacement have happened since. If it doesn’t get recorded it’s prehistory, and prehistory is just a little tantalizing.