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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to think that the fantasy/speculative fiction trope of "precursor civilization that has advanced tech" was probably grounded in the historical memory of people happening upon ruins, weapons and artifacts of extraordinary craftsmanship.

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Such myths are likely based on classical Rome rather than bronze age discoveries.

For several centuries after the Western empire fell apart, Europeans lacked the capability to build settlements or structures anywhere close to the size typical of classical Roman civilization. Populations were depressed by pestilence, social order had declined, and most Europeans were within a short distance from a former Roman settlement of a size larger than they'd ever seen populated in their lives. The Eastern empire was a little different, but Western Europe was pretty much fubar in the early middle ages.

Although technology steadily progressed throughout the middle ages, it took centuries for population and social organization to return to anywhere near classical levels. If you lived during the early middle age, it was an unmistakable fact that a great "precursor civilization" capable of wonders far beyond what your own civilization was capable of had lived and fallen long before you were born. With colossal roman ruins scattered across Europe, there was no need to look to the bronze age for a fallen civilization.

It goes further back than that. In 400BC, Xenophon, while retreating from a failed attempt at taking Babylon, came across the abandoned ruins of a bunch of Assyrian cities, like Nineveh and wrote about them. 200 years after being abandoned, they were far more impressive than anything Xenophon would have seen in his home country. For example, Athens at that point had a city wall(the Themistoclean wall) approximately 5 miles circumference, made of rubble, 30' tall, 10' thick at the base

Compare to what Xenophon saw at Nineveh: A city wall 7.5 miles circumference, made of stone and brick, 55' tall and up to 50' thick. The most impressive structures he would have ever seen - just out in the middle of nowhere, absolutely abandoned.

Just a quick plug for the marvellous Landmark edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Landmark-Xenophons-Anabasis-Shane-B...

Beautiful book with lots of maps and illustrations covering the journey mentioned above, if that’s anyone’s bag.

The Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Assyrians starts with Xenophon's experience.

My YouTube feed has been (pleasantly) taken over by ancient Rome videos where historians and archaeologists cover how various Roman inventions and buildings worked.

I don't think people realize how far ahead of everyone else Rome was at that time.

Like most people know that Rome had aqueducts bringing in water to the city, but they probably don't know that water was supplied to different buildings directly, and you could pay to get a line installed straight to your house. Running water in your house, 2000 years ago!

Sounds interesting. Do you have any channels or particular videos you'd recommend?

Look up “Ancient Rome Live” on YouTube and then go down the recommendations rabbithole.

That trope is about something so forgotten that any discoveries would be entirely unexpected. But awareness of Rome was never lost, quite the opposite. Even bureaucratic connections survived, they just shifted back a gear from political to spiritual authority. Most nominal titles like count or duke assumed by european nobility derive their names from some role in Roman administration, they all considered themselves as continuation of something that never disappeared but merely changed shape.

Came here to say much the same thing. A great book that gets into the details of this is https://www.amazon.com/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-40...

TLDR; people considered themselves "Roman", or something adjacent to it, long after the western empire officially disintegrated, and of course in the east it didn't really die.

Even on the outskirts (e.g. Romano-British) people held onto Roman, Christian, and Latin culture at a very deep level. And even when the Anglo-Saxons invaded they were extremely aware of who and what the Roman ruins etc. were, even if they chose not to settle in them in many cases.

> Even on the outskirts (e.g. Romano-British) people held onto Roman, Christian, and Latin culture at a very deep level.

Three of the 10 most common languages on Earth boil down to "Latin with a bad accent".

Exactly, and the most popular religion in the world is basically cultural continuity with late western Roman culture and its largest most organized official form even uses the Latin language and maintains political institutions with continuous lineage back to Rome.

I don't think there's a real timeline where Europeans were wandering around the ruins of the suddenly collapsed empire wondering who these people were. They knew fully, but the economic and political (and physical! plague!) situation meant they were unable to reconstruct the Pax Romana.

But they certainly tried, even when they were former "outsiders" like the Franks (who, in the west half of their realm, even dropped their native tongue to speak a form of Latin!).

In fact I feel it's possible that actual "progress" wasn't possible in Europe until philosophical thought moved beyond late-Roman neo-Platonic & neo-Aristotelian boundaries, and into new radical enlightenment era concepts.

Knowing fully what happened to Rome, if it’s even possible, would have been limited to the educated class. Stories would still have come out of the peasant class, whose folk memory of Rome couldn’t match what the clergy had.

Eventually we did remake the Pax Romana, but it took two utterly ruinous wars, humanism, and a working knowledge of free trade to recreate the system that Rome had managed to create almost by accident.

What has been created with modern global capitalism is extremely different from the Roman form of commerce and administration. Not just in technology but in complete ideological foundations. Not only was slavery fundamental to its whole foundation, its accepted and normal practices for doing business would today, in the west, be considered forms of absolute extreme corruption, and their justice system would absolutely horrify us.

I'd posit that today's world is what it is because it is partially on built enlightenment values that stepped away from the old Roman model, not back to it.

If you look at what the Romans in the context of their own time, it looks much different. Citizenship was an open class, unlike most everyone in the Mediterranean. Slaves actually had rights. Conquered peoples were able to earn tributes in future conquests. Women could own property. Yes, it’s all terrible by our standards, but becoming Roman could actually improve the lives of subject common people.

Reproducing the previous society is the mistake, because it wasn’t just the society. It was the free trade and lack of Mediterranean piracy that brought prosperity. The relatively increased civil rights that brought stability, and Senate that brought legitimacy. They had a model that produced the best economy and civil rights for their era, but looking backwards to past glories can’t replicate that.

Polish nobility, stretching well into today’s Ukraine, was inventing ways in which they were continuation of imaginary outskirts of said empire.

Russian Orthodox nationalists have this fantasy still. Including Putin.

https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p28_4.xml

that article is a long winded way of rehashing the old Tzarist claim that the Russian Empire was the inheritor of the Byzantines, a self-styled "Third Rome".

Putin simply sees himself as the new Tzar, and by extension master of the lands of the Third Rome, i.e. the Baltics, Ukraine, et al.

Most of what you wrote was true for the most of the Mediterranean after the Bronze Age collapse too. That is why the Greeks and Romans also had such myths, remember Atlantis is something that seemingly originated with Plato.

There was also the Minoan civilization, wiped out by the eruption of Santorini. Probably inspired the Atlantis legend.

There was also purely intellectual evidence from an advanced civilization, in form of surviving books by Greek philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers.

The epic of Gilgamesh starts out talking about the distant past.

Almost everywhere on earth, there have been many regional collapses in different times. This is enough for a corpus of stories about mythical, great past to be created, survive through the highwater mark of the next cycle of civilization (which was usually higher than the previous great past), and provide context during the next collapse and it's aftermath.

When Roman power in the West collapsed, and, for example, the remaining population of Arles retreated into the amphitheater of their previously much greater and more prosperous city, building a fortification in the middle and from the ruins of what used to be before, there were almost certainly people among them who could recite Hesiod. I just for some reason find this so trippy.

And oral history I'm sure. We will probably never know how advanced and widespread some of these ancient technologies are but the existence of artifacts that are far, far ahead of anything we would expect historically (e.g. Antikythera Mechanism, Gobekli Tepe) suggests there are some big, big holes in our records of the past.

I don't think anybody really thought much about it before the discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, but at least in retrospect there seem to be clear reference to such devices in ancient contemporary literature. Particularly, Cicero described such devices and attributed them to Archimedes.

I find the ancient stone works the best evidence for some kind of advanced civilization in the far past. (No not aliens). Some date back 10.000 years ago. The precision and similarities between different sites all over the world is incredible. We are just in the beginning of this research field.

I think it might be a general bias in the human psyche. When you're born, you're utterly dependent on the gods that are your parents (and extended village, to a greater or lesser extent) and this has selected for a bias in the human brain that expresses itself as "older people good, oldest people better".

I base this only on finding the trope of "precursor civilisation/society with the best tech" in literature from across the globe.

Before written text and easy access to books and knowledge, you also relied on the experience and skills of older people to learn and make your way in the world.

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