Nah. It’s “ancient” vs “modern”. “Modern” is anything well-documented or easily translated into English, “ancient” is anything that lacks documentation or has ambiguous translations. Some things I’ve seen ancient alien people freak out about: Stonehinge, pyramids, roman dodecahedrons, antikythera mechanism, ancient astronauts, UFOs in medieval/Renaissance art (yes, that is supposedly a thing), Nazca lines, and more.
My point is that anything even remotely weird or inexplicable with any historical ambiguity is up for grabs when it comes to ancient alien theories. At least, that’s been my observation.
Okay, but that’s not on the ancient aliens people. According to your Wikipedia page, it wasn’t ancient alien theorists trying to prove bullshit that destroyed them, that was done by Christian nutjobs hundreds of years before anyone came up with the idea of ancient aliens.
I don’t know that a Quipu is a good example because we don’t actually know how they worked or how well they documented things. The burning of Mayan and other Mesoamerican books would be better examples.
There’s been some very minimal translation of the few that remain, having to do with numbers and counting. They most definitely contain information. They mean something.
This is also making me think - these words that I am typing now, are they not also mnemonic devices? The written words are not the spoken words, and neither of those are the concepts that we understand the words and phrases to represent. Words are only models of ideas, and models are by definition not as accurate as what they intend to model. Who are we to say that a series of marks on a clay tablet, or paper, or a computer screen are more accurate models of ideas than intricate series of knots in strings?
Nah. It’s “ancient” vs “modern”. “Modern” is anything well-documented or easily translated into English, “ancient” is anything that lacks documentation or has ambiguous translations. Some things I’ve seen ancient alien people freak out about: Stonehinge, pyramids, roman dodecahedrons, antikythera mechanism, ancient astronauts, UFOs in medieval/Renaissance art (yes, that is supposedly a thing), Nazca lines, and more.
My point is that anything even remotely weird or inexplicable with any historical ambiguity is up for grabs when it comes to ancient alien theories. At least, that’s been my observation.
*shrug*
There would be a lot more well-documented ancient things if racists hadn’t actively destroyed ancient documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu for example.
Okay, but that’s not on the ancient aliens people. According to your Wikipedia page, it wasn’t ancient alien theorists trying to prove bullshit that destroyed them, that was done by Christian nutjobs hundreds of years before anyone came up with the idea of ancient aliens.
He didn’t say ‘ancient alien theorists’, he said ‘racists’.
I don’t know that a Quipu is a good example because we don’t actually know how they worked or how well they documented things. The burning of Mayan and other Mesoamerican books would be better examples.
Those are also good examples - but Europeans most definitely sought to destroy any quipu they found.
Sure, I’m just saying that we don’t know if they would be something readable or if they were more like a mnemonic device.
There’s been some very minimal translation of the few that remain, having to do with numbers and counting. They most definitely contain information. They mean something.
This is also making me think - these words that I am typing now, are they not also mnemonic devices? The written words are not the spoken words, and neither of those are the concepts that we understand the words and phrases to represent. Words are only models of ideas, and models are by definition not as accurate as what they intend to model. Who are we to say that a series of marks on a clay tablet, or paper, or a computer screen are more accurate models of ideas than intricate series of knots in strings?