AndrewKrause

Today when we talk about lost civilizations, it’s only because of the strange artifacts they left behind. The pyramids at Giza defy our understanding because we could not easily replicate them with our modern construction tools. The same goes for Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, the pyramids of Asia, the Nazca lines and other oddities from antiquity. Then there’s the Antikythera Mechanism. But first…

If you were to chart the development of human civilization and put the modern western world at the maxim of human achievement, one thing becomes clear. The last two centuries outweigh the previous four millenia of human achievement. In the space of a hundred years came antibiotics, sanitation, electricity, computing, communication, the automobile, the airplane, the moon landings, nuclear power, satellites, and the Internet. That which was imagined by science fiction writers in one generation was an everyday reality in the next. At this rate of technological evolution, scientists can make fantastic predictions about the next hundred years with a straight face. In conclusion, human civilization has never been this advanced.

Then there’s the Antikythera Mechanism. In 1900, sponge divers off the coast of Antikythera Island in Greece came across the wreck of an ancient cargo ship from abound 100 years BCE. While sponges paid well enough, the black market for antiquities could make a poor Greek diver fabulously rich by Greek standards. One artifact, which appeared to be a carved rock, caught the attention of acheologist Valerios Stais who noticed a gear-like protrusion. X-ray photographs showed a complex mechanism inside of a heavily encrusted metal box. The precision of the gears and layout of the mechanism resembled that of fine clocks made in Europe in the late 1800s, but it was clearly not a clock. The dials on its surface had months, days, years, and astrological symbols inscribed on it. It was a mechanical computer for making astrological calculations. Charles Babbage had invented a simple mechanical calculator just 80 years before, but it was nearly a hundred times the size of this mechanism. Practical mechanical computers would be used for telephone systems ten years after the discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, and the last mechanical computers were ripped out of A-6 Intruder attack planes during the Viet Nam war and replaced with digital electronic computers.

Our first evidence of the Antikythera mechanism was overlooked for centuries. The earliest account of the device is found in De Natura Deorum by the Roman philosopher Cicero. Cicero had witnessed a celestial computer which had been taken after the seige of a greek city in 312 BCE. In the 9th Century, the Caliph of Baghdad commissioned the Kitab al-Hiyal, or “Book of Ingenious Devices”. It contained over a hundred examples of such devices from the Greco-roman world. In hindsight it seems like the Antikythera mechanism shouldn’t be very surprising at all to a world which claims to be the heir to the legacy of Rome. And yet, very little was known about the device at the time of its discovery.

Then, there’s the Baghdad battery. Yes, it gets stranger. In 1936, archeologists working near Baghdad, Iraq uncovered a number of clay jars containing a copper cylinder and an iron rod. The device was capped off with asphalt. If filled with vinegar, lemon juice, or grape juice, it would make a simple cell. A number of these cells together formed a battery capable of a number of volts of electricity sufficent enough to be used to electroplate metals. The Baghdad battery was dated to as early as 250 BCE.

We take computers and batteries for granted, but recognize them as distinctly modern artifacts. So how are we to explain these ancient rivals to modern technology? And more to the point, what other evidence of our technological past have we ignored? Then consider that our progress in the last two hundred years comes on the heels of two millenia which saw these artifacts buried and forgotten. Suddently, there’s the nagging sensation that perhaps we’ve been this far along before. The dark ages which proceeded from the fall of Rome erased much of the progress of the greco-Roman world, and Rome itself had been preceeded by dozens of great millenial empires. How short is human memory?

Ancient Vedic texts written in Sanskrit and dating to thousands of years BCE are replete with stories of “vimana” as chariots of the Gods. They are almost forgettable until one comes to the Samara Sutradhara, which contains graphic technical depictions of vimana. The vimana could shoot “astra”, which were spears that belched fire as a means of propulsion. Shooting down vimana often involved a laser-beam like weapon called a “marika”. At last, we come to the Mahabharata, a 2,500 year old vedic epic written in Sanskrit. The Mahabharata describes great conflicts among the Gods, with descriptions of weapons employed in the conflict. One weapon, which was later banned for use on Earth by Gods and humans alike, was described as follows:

“Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Vimana hurled against the three cities of the Vrishis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant as ten thousands suns, rose in all its splendour. It was the unknown weapon, the Iron Thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.”

The survivors of Gurkha’s attack didn’t fare much better than the victims. Their hair and nails fell out, and they died a slow wasting death. The description of nuclear annihilation and radiological poisoning is familiar to modern readers. Mohenjodaro in Pakistan is believed to be one of the three cities of the Vrishis and Andhakas mentioned in Gurkha’s attack. In 1936, a Hungarian scholar named Guillaume de Hevesy studied the as-yet unstranslated Indus script found found at archeological sites in and around Mohenjodaro. Some 40 of the glyphs were found to be nearly identical with a script - also untranslated - known as Rongorongo. The only place rongorongo is found is on tablets located ten thousand miles away among the Maoi carvings on Easter Island - another lost civilization with mysterious artifacts that defy our understanding.