Nothing human , since Antarctica has been a frozen desert for the last 15 million years
Not in the least. The ancient Roman civilization grew up in the shadow of the Etruscans and left records of centuries of coexistence and conflict with Etruria, so there had never been a time when Etruscans were forgotten. It sucks though that no Roman studies of the Etruscan language are extant, so that the language remains poorly understood even though well documented.
I think one good answer to the OP’s question would be Sumer. As far as anyone knew until the late 19th century, Babylon was the oldest and original civilization of Mesopotamia. It was a huge surprise to learn that Babylon was the successor to a much older civilization. The Sumerians had been completely forgotten for millennia.
Until the advent of radio-carbon dating, anthropologists made the assumption that civiilization radiated from the Fertile Crescent, so the discovery of cities that predate the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia was a surprise.
In addition to Çatalhöyük, the Cucuteni-Tripolye civilization centered near the Dniester River (Moldavia) and peaking 4000-3500 BC wasn’t discovered until almost the 20th century. Some cities had 1600 buildings; some were were rebuilt with up to 13 levels. In present-day Portugal and southern Spain are impressive cities associated with the Bell Beaker Copper Age and dating from about 3000 BC. Zambujal, for example, was unearthed only in 1932.
And, although not qualifying as “civilization”, I’m impressed that in 4700 BC, a 340-ton monolith (Le Grand Menhir Brisé) was quarried, moved and erected by a prehistoric culture in Brittany. It fell and broke 700 years later, but retained its record as largest monolith ever moved until Egypt’s Old Kingdom.
No problem. I thought it was fascinating.
The people who built Tiwanaku are quite mysterious-they were able to make extremely straight cuts in stone blocks-and even used arsenical bronze to clamp stone blocks together-no other use of this has been seen in the Americas. the other strange thing is that they made sculptures-which are laughably crude-while their stonework was highly sophisticated.
Lovecraft begs to differ…
We’ve got a better idea than even 30 years ago or so, mostly from things like careful nuclear analysis of the pits and soil samples, but I believe our picture is still a very sparsely tiled mosaic.
The Druids never had anything to do with it until modern times. But they’re welcome to their silly blood-of-a-tree ceremonies and such there, I guess.
Jericho was a stone-walled city around 9,000 bc, surrounded by a moat (cut into the rock) 33ft wide and 7 ft deep. There was a tower that could have been of considerable height.
Me too, thanks! And I hope all goes well with your book.
Houston’s Museum of Natural Science is showing China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery Of Sanxingdui.
So–no bodies & no writing. But the artifacts look quite different from other ancient Chinese things. (I’d seen a few in another show, some years back.)
(The 25.00 exhibit charge seemed ridiculous, especially on top of the 20.00 museum admission. Then I realized becoming a Member would be more economical if I visit the place a few more times this year. Given the wonderful new Paleontology wing & the new Egyptian galleries, I’m a happy member!)
I think the Mound Builders are interesting because they built these huge mounds and seemed advanced yet left almost no records like pottery.
The Mound Builders are fascinating. I researched the early mounds in Louisiana, Watson Brake and Poverty Point. No farming, and probably not settled permanently, but the hugely rich environment of the Mississippi. Watson Brake was 3500 BC and Poverty Point nearly 2000 years later. I could not believe the size of the mosquitos at Poverty Point!
So these are massive monuments built by hunter gatherers which is really challenging the commonly held idea that farming is needed to provide extra time for monument building.
They did make millions of baked shapes made of loess, known as “Poverty Point Objects” or PPOs. And left some pottery. But they left lots of other artefacts especially carved stone objects. At Poverty Point there was no stone naturally, but they had massive trade networks so lots of stone was built to the site. Then is goes on through the millennia ending up with he sophisticated site like Cahokia in Illinois.
I can’t remember.
The Hittite state (fl. ~1700-1200BC) was pretty well forgotten until scientific excavation beginning in 1906 revealed evidence of an extensive literate civilization whose capital city may have had a population of 50,000.
Interestingly though people of Hittite ethnicity were specifically mentioned in the OT - the most famous being “Uriah the Hittite”, the unfortunate husband of Bathsheba (he’s the ‘inconvienient’ husband king David sends to the ‘forefront of the battle’ so he can ‘legitimately’ marry Bathsheba - apparently, David had got her pregnant while he was out fighting in David’s army, David orders him to come home so he could create some pausible deniability, Uriah refuses because he’s too honourable to leave his troops, David has him killed - according to the story. Nice guy. ).
These events were alleged to have taken place a couple of hundred years after the Hittite kingdom fell apart, though.
How about the Sabean civilization (in modern day Yemen)? Has their language been decoded?
My favorite is Doggerland, which existed back when the British Isles were still connected to Europe. Apparently was discovered by fishermen dragging up gnawed mammoth bones, spear points, Neanderthal skulls and such like. Like all the best Hollywood disasters, it was innundated slowly at first by rising sea levels, and then all at once by a megatsunami.
A close second is the Green Sahara. Qadaffi will be remembered for (mostly) bad things, but his Man Made River is literally making the desert bloom by tapping into some of the ancient groundwater partly left over from this period.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Hyboria yet.
Many civilizations in Central Asia has been totally destroyed by the Mongol conquest. You can count them. The reason you never heard about them is because they are largely forgotten.
Sure! The alphabet is called Old South Arabian Epigraphic, and it is the ancestor of the Ethiopic abugida (writing system) developed for Ge‘ez and used to this day for Amharic & Tigrinya. The extinct Old South Arabian language, ancestor of Ethiopic languages, is pretty well understood thanks to Semitic cognates. (Not to be confused with modern South Arabian languages like Mahra or Soqotri, which are a totally different branch of Semitic).