I figured I should add something to my 'Ancient History' category, since I
went to the trouble of creating it.
I've been interested in ancient history, and ancient civilizations in
particular, ever since I was a kid. Originally, I was fascinated with Egypt,
but as I got older I learned about Sumer, and Babylon, and Chichen Itza, and
other ancient cities around the globe.
An then a funny thing happened... it started to seem obvious to me that the
civilizations that built these cities seemed to have a lot in common, both in
their architecture and mythology. I started looking into that, and I found out
that we really don't know how they built the things they built, and couldn't
duplicate their structures with modern equipment, let alone the kind of
technology we suspect they had to work with. Furthermore, when they wrote
about how they built stuff, especially the really big stuff, they just say
that the gods helped them.
The Sumerians, considered to be the first of the ancient civilizations, just
popped up out of nowhere. One day they were nomads living in tents, and the
next day they were building huge and sophisticated cities, with complex
plumbing and drainage systems, surrounded by huge irrigated farms. How this
transition happened seems like a big mystery, except that the Sumerians are
pretty clear about it: they wrote that the gods showed up one day and showed
them how to build cities.
This is what really fascinates me about ancient civilizations: they all seem
to stem from more ancient, and not generally recognized, civilizations. Yes,
I'm talking about Atlantis, but there were two others as well.
I won't get into all of the details, but from everything I've read it seems
that during the last ice age, around 10000 years ago, there were three large
and advanced civilizations in the world. Atlantis, either in the atlantic
ocean or possibly the northernmost pennisula of Antarctica, Mu, in the south
pacific, and the ancient Rama Empire civilization in India, which wrote the
Vedas.
The Vedas talk about these civilizations, and wars between them; echos of
those stories appear in mythology around the world. So does the 'Flood' story,
which seems like it relates to the end of the ice age, when sea levels rose,
the Mediterranean plains became the Mediterranean sea, and any large cities,
which would have been mostly on coastlines, would have been destroyed.
Why don't we have more physical evidence of these civilizations? We have a lot
actually, but it's not generally recognized by scholars. But the really good
stuff, the big cities, would all be underwater now, on the edges of the
contenental shelves. A lot of that has probably been lost due to landslides
from the shelf edges into the adjoining rifts, but there should still be
something left to discover.
So that's why I want to be an archeologist: I think there are major
discoveries just sitting out there, waiting for someone to come looking. If I
pursued this, I would get myself a nice boat, some side-scanning sonar
equipment, scuba gear, maybe an ROV, and go searching around the northern
Carribean and Bahamas area. At the very least, it'd be a nice lifestyle down
there.
Or maybe I should just try to build a Vimana.