New Findings on the Mycenaean Cemetery at the 'Palace of Nestor' in Pylos | Hacker News Reader

New Findings on the Mycenaean Cemetery at the 'Palace of Nestor' in Pylos

archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com

59 pointsdiodorus15 comments

It is darkly fascinating that the Bronze Age civilization reached such heights 3500 years ago, then collapsed and almost everything went dark.

The counterfactual history where they continued to thrive, built a Mediterranean empire a thousand years before Rome, learnt to navigate the oceans and possibly reached the Space Age a thousand years earlier than we did, is fascinating too.

You might be interested in reading “The Silurian Hypothesis”. If previous civilizations existed, would we be able to tell?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

I don't see how we wouldn't be able to --unless they were able to perfectly able to reprocess everything back into semi-original form. I guess another possibility is if the civilization were so small that coming across artifacts by pure change is very low.

We have evidence of Dinosaurs from over 200MM ya --and even older fossils originally made of perfectly compostable matter.

The paper addresses these points:

As an example, for all the dinosaurs that ever lived, there are only a few thousand near-complete specimens, or equivalently only a handful of individual animals across thousands of taxa per 100,000 years.

Conceptually see also:

dematerialization refers to the absolute or relative reduction in the quantity of materials required to serve economic functions in society. In common terms, dematerialization means doing more with less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

Also: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43822733-more-from-less

But try dinosaurs are over 200MM ya. Humanoids nog more than a few million years.

Not quite, no. The Mesozoic Era lasted from 251 to 66 million years ago. While 66 my is a long time, there may be human processes which "recycle" materials of previous civilizations in ways that make the previous ones harder to discern.

Know about the 4000 year old Greek pyramid? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29760413

Civilization elsewhere (China, South Asia, the Americas, etc) continued progressing even after this collapse. There is also no reason to believe that even the affected areas were that severely affected; sure centralized institutions might have collapsed, but it’s not clear what the cultural and demographic effects were.

Several hundred years without stone buildings and written records [0] seem to be a fairly severe consequence to me. That means loss of the educated class, which is usually the bearer of future progress.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

It would seem like nobody’s bothered to push a ground penetrating radar device around most of the Mycenaean and Minoan sites.

Looks like drone-mounted GPRs are en vogue nowadays. Gotta scale out to reduce labor costs.

>> Tomb of the Griffin Warrior

Delightfully epic section title worthy of its own Power Metal hymn.

Also, it makes me want to roleplay in tha era. Are there any pnp RPG supplements for that historical period?

I see the Runequest and Mythras rulesets mentioned a lot in Bronze Age RPG discussions. There's also a GURPS Greece and the AD&D 2e Age of Heroes sourcebook. I'm sure there are heaps more.

I've always wanted to try Runequest- I hadn't heard of Mythras, I'll have a look. Thank you for the suggestions!

Extraordinary discovery! Maybe one of these is the tomb of a legendary king from the Iliad!

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