Plumbing, Civil Rights and Technology: What the World Lost When the Greeks Conquered Troy and the Aryans Conquered the Dravids

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The legends of the dark times in Europe and Asia are full of admiration for lost civilizations, developed so highly that listeners of these legends could hardly believe. Much later, with scientific progress, Europeans began to treat these legends with increasing skepticism: it is clear that the world is developing from simple technologies to complex ones, where can complex technologies come from to simple ones? With the development of archeology, mankind again had to believe in lost civilizations. At least in comparison to the tellers of the legends, they were very realistic. No Atlantis and aliens - the creations of the human mind and hands.

At the end of the Bronze Age, what can be called the Apocalypse happened - at least for several developed cultures at once. Natural disasters and economic crises began to shake them, and the final blow was struck by the raids of much less developed peoples. For four long centuries, barbarism reigned in the lands where before that people used baths, studied sciences, wrote poetry and traded with cities on the other side of the seas. The Hittite kingdom in modern Turkey, the Mycenaean kingdom in Crete, the Egyptian Empire, the Harappan civilization in pre-Aryan India, and the great Babylon in Mesopotamia became the victims of the Apocalypse. Their remains began to be considered their heritage by the barbarians who came to these lands, and the descendants of these barbarians.

Aryans and the Harappan Civilization: Northern Barbarians Against Written Farmers

The masterpieces of the Indian epic made the hearts of European archaeologists beat in anticipation of the finds. What could the great ancient Aryans leave behind? It is unlikely that their carts really flew, but they could be great. Surely, somewhere in the jungle, palaces are hiding, from the beauty and majesty of which the heart stops. Surely many masterpieces of poetry or sculpture did not reach descendants …

Indeed, excavations in India have produced amazing results. The most ancient developed cities in South Asia were found here. Their layout spoke of the projected development, which means about the developed city administration, the presence of bureaucracy. The houses had baths, the streets had public toilets, and the covered sewage system was well thought out. In addition to the sewerage system, the townspeople used the drainage system. Each group of houses had its own well.

Interestingly, the walls around these cities were much better protected from seasonal floods than from the invasion of enemies. Probably, civilization did not know worthy opponents. Probably, the inhabitants of the ancient cities had a kind of social policy; the general standard of living was approximately the same in all districts. It seems incredible, but history knows other examples of egalitarian societies, for example, the settlement of Chatal-Huyuk, where after the ancient revolution there were no nobles and beggars, and women, apparently, were equal in rights to men, or the Inca empire with a system of clear distribution of scarce benefits to society and sanitary inspectors who check homes.

Of course, the ancient Indians had music, medicine, advanced mathematics (with a single system of measures), well-built agriculture, sculpture, dance and writing. It was writing - the discovered individual inscriptions and entire libraries - that alerted researchers. After a long study, they came to the conclusion that civilization has nothing to do with the wise Aryans. On the contrary, the Aryans in India are alien barbarians and, most likely, had a hand in the downfall of this culture. And it was based on the dark-skinned Dravids - those who, after the domination of the Aryans, began to be considered savages, incapable of pure pursuits and training. The Dravids, although they also have Indo-Mediterranean origin, are more likely to belong to the Veddo-Australoid race. This completely turns the look at the beliefs of the Aryans (and their descendants) on how the world works and on what the civilization of the people depends.

There is no evidence that the alien Aryans staged a grand massacre - this speaks in their favor. Nevertheless, at some point, the Harappan civilization fell, and the early, barbarian Aryan civilization reigned. The new owners of Indian lands had no idea about sewage and urban planning, they arrived on horses and carts - how could they be able to handle a stone? Probably, in terms of intangible culture, they also had to take a lot from the indigenous people. That did not prevent them from being oppressed and despised later. It is even believed that the Dravids were bred in the Ramayana under the guise of ape people, and the Ramayana itself poetically tells about the Aryan invasion.

Egypt: farewell to greatness forever

The era in the history of ancient Egypt, which historians would later call the New Kingdom, was the time of the highest flowering of statehood. At this time, the subjects of the Egyptian pharaohs made up one fifth of the entire population of the Earth (no kidding), so the Egyptian empire grew. In the era of the New Kingdom, the great Hatshepsut ruled, her stepson Thutmose III, the reformer Akhenaten, the boy Tutankhamun, the warlike and powerful body Ramses II.

It was in the era of the New Kingdom that the pharaohs began to be buried in the legendary Valley of the Kings. Egypt became the richest empire of its time. Sculpture and architecture, diplomacy and science have risen to unprecedented heights. During the New Kingdom, one of the first attempts in the history of mankind was made to introduce monotheism as a religion. The world's first large-scale battle with the active use of chariots took place between the army of Ramses II and the army of the Hittites, and after this battle the first peace treaty in the world was signed. The most grandiose temples in Egyptian history were built in the New Kingdom.

Alas, the empire began to fall apart step by step during the raids of the barbarians known as the Sea Peoples. The royal power is weakening, and the rise of religious power does not in any way improve the life of ordinary Egyptians and the fortress of the state borders. During the catastrophe of the Bronze Age, the kingdom was ravaged by raids by the Nubians, Ethiopians, Assyrians and Libyans, to the extent that in Lower Egypt, which became a separate country, the king of Libyans sits on the throne. The same king is destroying Jerusalem, taking advantage of the death of Solomon. Power in another part of Egypt is seized by the Nubians who were previously subordinate to the pharaohs. The former empire has been torn apart by civil wars for years. This whirlwind lasted four centuries. Science and arts fell into decay, agriculture and handicrafts too.

The Renaissance after the catastrophe was short, and Egypt as an independent state, which was revived for a short time, turned into the outlying lands of other empires and a toy of foreign dynasties. The ancestors of the ancient Egyptians still live on their land, but have long been an ethnic minority.

Achaeans against the Hittites: how the barbarians destroyed democracy and buried humanism

Having learned how to make chariots from the Aryan nomads and process iron from the Hutts they conquered, they carried (whom the neighbors stubbornly called Hittites in honor of those who ruled their lands before) became one of the most formidable opponents of great Egypt. At first, the Hittite writing was also borrowed - they used Babylonian cuneiform, but later they developed more convenient hieroglyphs for their needs, having seen the very idea, probably from the Egyptians.

For its time, Hittite society was very advanced. Women had a high social status (in comparison with those societies that later took the place of the Hittite kingdom); all positions, including the tsar's, demanded elections; extremely rarely, the death penalty was prescribed for crimes, and there were mechanisms to combat blood feud. In addition, it seems that in the Hittite kingdom, a negative attitude was formed towards such a popular way of regulating the number of children in a family, such as killing babies. There was only one way to do it: sacrifice. But, since human sacrifice was prohibited and the priests would not slaughter the children, the parents wrapped the babies in animal skins and threw them off the wall, saying that it was, they say, not a child, but a bull.

Surprisingly, at the same time, the Hittites worshiped such bloodthirsty gods as Sutekh, Astarte, Shavushka and others associated with war, force, and battle. Among the sacred animals among the Hittites, one could find an image of a two-headed eagle, among other symbols - an equilateral triangle, sometimes with eyes inside.

One of the most famous Hittite cities, Troy, was destroyed precisely during the Bronze Age catastrophe. Those whom we used to perceive as heroes - the characters of the Iliad - for the Hittites were one of the barbarian peoples of the sea, coming wave after wave on much more developed states and destroying civilization, burying its achievements. After one of these raids into another Hittite city, Karaoglan, no one returned, and archaeologists found streets full of skeletons with traces of weapons on the excavations. Hattusa, the capital of the kingdom, was destroyed and not rebuilt.

Crete: the end of an era of wonderful palaces

The Minoan civilization in Crete still commands respect for its achievements. The island's cultural and economic life was centered around gigantic palaces - in modern times they would be called residential complexes. The Minoans were allies of the Egyptians, conducted an active maritime trade, sometimes reaching very distant shores, and, like the Harappans, did not fear raids on the cities: there were no fortifications around the palaces. Apparently, the Minoans did not know raids and civil wars.

Crete of the Minoan period has all the signs of an organized state, but what is strange is that not a single indication has been found that there was at least once one universal ruler. Like the Hittites, Minoan women led an active social life, mainly associated with religion. The palaces were erected five stories high, they had running water and sewerage, and the Cretans bathed every day. Sculpture and painting were developed, their own writing existed, the Cretans went in for sports and music.

Centuries after the Cretans were first conquered by the Achaean Greeks, the descendants of the victors wrote that Crete was formerly inhabited by barbarians. In fact, of course, the conquerors were much lower on the cultural ladder. In many ways, the conquerors adopted the culture of the conquered, except that instead of palaces, they built fortresses that were striking in their size: they were built from huge blocks of several tons in weight.

The Mycenaean civilization, the successor to the Minoan civilization, was also well developed, in which a significant part of the population was made up of indigenous Cretans, but at the end of the Bronze Age it fell. There were many reasons. First, a man-made ecological disaster: the forests of Crete were cut down almost completely for economic purposes. Secondly, the era of devastating droughts has come (which may be due to the fact that people have destroyed forests along all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea). Finally, the Mycenaean civilization fell under the onslaught of the Dorian Greeks, one of the barbarian peoples of the sea. Women were closed for a long time in the female half of the house and learned to hide their faces in public with a veil. The old writing disappeared - probably, but naturally with the memory of the old literature. Plumbing and sewerage are no longer part of everyday life. Europe stepped back for a long time, to barbarism, and the memory of the great centuries of Crete turned into a legend about Atlantis.

The fall of a more developed civilization under the onslaught of a more armed and warlike civilization occurred more than once afterwards. For example, before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Incas had developed social policies and antibiotics. Why serving is a holiday and other subtleties from the life of women of the Inca empire, however, will remind us that not everything in the Inca society was arranged justly.