There are plenty of “Lost Race” stories starting in the late 19th century, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, in which someone encounters an unknown group or long-forgotten group still inhabiting a city. Abraham Merritt’s the Moon Pool is another, and Pierre Benoit’s Atlantida, and H. Rider Haggard’s She, and countless others.
But I’ve recently stumbled upon a different thing in my reading, although I’ve known about them for years. I think encountering so many so close together got me thinking about the concept. Several of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories involve ancient crumbling cities devoid of their original inhabitants (the people there are newcomers), or miraculously restored ancient cities – “Red Nails”, “Jewels of Gwahlur”, “The Devil in Iron”, “Queen of the Black Coast”, the uncompleted “Hall of the Dead”, and others. His stories are set in the mythical “Hyborian Age”, which seems to be tens of thousands of years ago. (Howard also wrote about Kull and Atlantis, which was supposed to be circa 100,000 years ago, but none of the ruins Conan runs across seem to be Alantean)
You get this in Tolkien, as well – his Middle Earth is about 6,000 year before the present, but it’s littered with ruins much older. The movies make much of this. Tolkien actually gives us the earlier history, in many cases. But it’s still weird to see characters in a long-ago setting walking through ruins much older.
I just re-read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in the Norton Critical Edition, which gives the various alternate texts – Wells made a lot of false starts on this, his first novel. The world of 807,201 AD, the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, is filled with fabulous palaces of granite and aluminum (!) crumbling apart and of decaying museums. This is weird, because it’s the world of the Far Future, but it still sort of fits in with the theme. It’s also weird because it need not be mysterious to the un-named Time Traveler – he’s got a Time Machine, after all. He can go back in time (to what is the future to him) and see these buildings in their heyday, and how they got that way. But he doesn’t – it wouldn’t fit the themes of the novel.
Reading the Middle Earth books, it didn’t feel very strange, since the technology and political systems felt pretty medieval, and ancient ruins feel completely normal in a medieval setting.
The prologue to the LotR movies, though, did make it seem strange since in the battle against Sauron, the run-of-the-mill armor and armament seemed so much better than any non-unique item in 3rd Age Middle Earth. The visuals of the ancient-looking, yet still quite effective, equipment definitely evoked a long-ago, lost Golden Age.
It’s not that much of a paradox since it happened in real life. One notable example is Xenophon, who was an ancient Greek by our standards (400s BC) but he was also a mercenary who ended up deep in Persian lands. He came across Nineveh, the then already ancient capital of Assyria, abandoned and ruined, and commented on how he could find no one who knew who the ancient people who lived in that great city were.
I’d say that’s not a paradox or a weird quirk. It’s like the thing that makes Tolkien so awesome. You start reading it thinking your reading stories of an mythical past, but actually that’s the boring mundane present, just the faded remnants of a great and terrible mythical past that is long gone, leaving only ancient stories and ruins
Yeah I was going to make the point you can’t really claim Tolkien invented the concept. The idea of a great and mythical past when men were men, and did heroic deeds, that had long gone to be replaced by a gruby mundane present is pretty much universal in classical histories regardless of culture
Indeed, but the Egyptians were still inhabiting the land (although the Cleopatra we’re familiar with was herself of Macedonian ancestry), so it doesn’t really fit the notion in the OP>
I never claimed that Tolkien invented this idea, by the way, or that oit’s inexplicable. Only that it’s interesting, and distinct from the “Lost Race” trope.
Cleopatra herself, by the way, was named after a character on Greek myth - several characters, in fact, including one in Homer. Forget about the Pyramids being old to Cleopatra, so was her own name.
This is another interesting thing, often overlooked – famous characters in history often bear the names of much older characters, or even mythological ones. The Marcus Junius Brutus who famously stabbed Julius Caesar (“Et tu, Brutus?”) bears the name of the semi-legendary Lucius Junius Brutus who founded the family, and who participated in the overthrow of Rome’s last king, Tarquinus Superbus. One wonders if Marcus saw his overthrowing Caesar as a replay of his ancestor’s role.
Likewise, we know that Caesar was not born by Caesarian section, because his mom was an important figure in his life and at the time c-sections were almost always fatal.
He was named for an earlier member of the family who was probably born by C-section; and this unknown ancestor was named after the procedure, which already existed at the time.
If you watched HBO’s “Rome”, they certainly played it that way. Brutus’ mother pushed him towards killing Caesar using this, and he himself used it to pump himself up to do the job.
Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,
walls gape, torn up, destroyed,
consumed by age. Earth-grip holds
the proud builders, departed, long lost,
and the hard grasp of the grave, until a hundred generations
of people have passed. Often this wall outlasted,
hoary with lichen, red-stained, withstanding the storm,
one reign after another; the high arch has now fallen.
The wall-stone still stands, hacked by weapons,
by grim-ground files.
Much later than Xenophon, Anglo-Saxons were inspired to poetry by the ruins of Roman cities:
An interesting variation of this is Jack Vance’s Tales of a Dying Earth, set many millions of years in the future when the sun is flickering out. Humanity seems to be barely holding on, living as what seems to be an agrarian society, albeit with all kinds of strange creatures, sorcery and magical/advanced scientific items lying around. Throughout the stories, Vance describes ancient ruins built and inhabited by advanced civilizations, now long gone and lost to history. What is interesting is to consider that these now extinct civilizations and societies, ancient as they are in the setting of the story, are actually millions of years in the future from us at the present. Just a really interesting concept.
Kipling’s Jungle Book had Mowgli taken by the Bandar-Log to an ancient and abandoned temple city, now the domain of the monkeys who pretended at being humans. Perhaps helping to spark the imagination of later writers describing coming across similar fantasy structures.
Dungeons & Dragons 5e mentioned in the books that a central conceit of the typical game world is that the world is ancient and has had multiple “ages” of civilization rise and fall. After all, you can’t send your guys out to explore the ancient fallen city of [whatever] and loot its gold and magic if there was never an ancient city to fall.
It’s pretty much a universal theme in all classical and medieval literature, regardless of culture. The was a “golden age” (literally that’s where the term comes from) when heros walked the earth and mythical deeds happened, but that age has long passed leaving nothing but stories and ruins. Now we are left with the mundane modern day reality where men are money grabbing and petty.
It definitely influenced Tolkien, though he does it incredibly well. The idea of a hidden mythical past that’s long gone and only revealed in hints here and there is what makes LoTR great IMO. The central theme IMO is that the days of mythical heros leading great armies are gone and now it’s down to ordinary folk to defeat evil.
The Tao Te Ching speaks of the “sages of ancient times.” But the book itself is already ancient. Who was it referring to who was more ancient than the ancients? I take it to mean Neolithic shamans.
Clark Ashton Smith did the same thing in his Zothique stories, set in a far future dying Earth. His stories appeared in the 1930s, predating Vance. Maybe they influenced Vance.
It’s a feature of real life. Not only do we have the middle ages following the end of the Western Roman Empire, but also there’s famously the Bronze Age collapse in the eastern Mediterranean that sparked the Homeric poems. Then there was another collapse before that one which the legend of Abraham may be a distant echo of. Finally, given the antiquity of the ruins of Göbekli Tepe and Jericho, the climate upheaval of the Younger Dryas period, speculation of some catastrophic event in that era and widespread archeological evidence of extreme warfare and massacres in the late Neolithic, and there may have been some now thoroughly lost advanced culture (if not what we’d call a civilization).
And if we’re not careful to commemorate it before it’s gone, the birthday cake by @Lumpy’s name will be but a fading memory lost in the mists of antiquity … until next year.
I think “ancient” has different connotations, depending on a person’s education. Those of us who understand how long history is and have some knowledge of it, tend to thing of “ancient” as being from the beginning of written accounts. It’s a fixed point in time. “Ancient Greece” is a particular era.
But many people are barely aware of that, if at all. For them, “ancient” is more like “before what my grandmother remembers from her grandmother”. For many Americans, “ancient” is effectively “before the Civil War”, or maybe “before the American Revolution”. A mere two or three centuries ago.