Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

[mooncliff]

I had never heard of the Moche. Their technology and art are unbelievable given they are 2000 to 1500 years old and isolated in Peru.

And when vast powerful civilizations vanish, the cause is usually...

Spectacular art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche_(culture)

This BBC documentary is really worth watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLXj6LKssI

[gwynedd1]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I had never heard of the Moche. Their technology and art are unbelievable given they are 2000 to 1500 years old and isolated in Peru.

And when vast powerful civilizations vanish, the cause is usually...

Socialism?

[Woodsman]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

Climate change? Funny how gold is in there too.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I had never heard of the Moche. Their technology and art are unbelievable given they are 2000 to 1500 years old and isolated in Peru.

And when vast powerful civilizations vanish, the cause is usually...

Spectacular art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche_(culture)

This BBC documentary is really worth watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLXj6LKssI

Actually if you read Graham Hancock, he has some pretty interesting theories on ancient advanced civilizations and no it doesnt have to do with aliens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock although he is ventured into some out there Tedtalk series on the drug DMT: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-d...hancocks-talk/

But his books are pretty good. I read most of them when I was 12 to 15 or so when I wanted to be an Egyptologist. Yea I was the kid at school talking about Dr. Zahi Hawass the head Egyptologist for the Cairo Museum or basically all of Egypt.

Here are his books I have read Fingerprints of the Gods, Underworld, The Sign and the Seal, Heavens Mirror and The Message of the Sphinx.

[LorenS]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

Sounds like they knew how to party.

The Moche may have also held and tortured the victims for several weeks before sacrificing them, with the intent of deliberately drawing blood. Verano believes that some parts of the victim may have been eaten as well in ritual cannibalism.^[6]

Climate change???

There are several theories as to what caused the demise of the Moche political structure. Some scholars have emphasised the role of environmental change. Studies of ice cores drilled from glaciers in the Andes reveal climatic events between 536 to 594 AD, possibly a super El Niño, that resulted in 30 years of intense rain and flooding followed by 30 years of drought, part of the aftermath of the climate changes of 535–536.^[8] These weather events could have disrupted the Moche way of life and shattered their faith in their religion, which had promised stable weather through sacrifices.

[wayiwalk]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

".....These weather events could have disrupted the Moche way of life and shattered their faith in their religion, which had promised stable weather through sacrifices......"

Aw come on. Wouldn't the leaders of the faith/gov't just ordered more sacrifices if the results were good?

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

".....These weather events could have disrupted the Moche way of life and shattered their faith in their religion, which had promised stable weather through sacrifices......"

Aw come on. Wouldn't the leaders of the faith/gov't just ordered more sacrifices if the results were good?

I take it you're saying that they should have engaged in an ancient form of Quantitative Easing?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I cling to a totally unsupported speculation which I pulled straight out of my own butt years ago, that advanced human civilizations have come and gone several times and we have no trace of them left.
Biologically modern homo sapiens have been on earth for at least 160,000 years, maybe 250,000 years.
Those were people just like you and me.

I don't accept that those folks just sat around primitive fires for 155,000 years and only then jumped up and got busy with the one-and-only neolithic revolution 5,000 years ago.
1,500 centuries is a damn long time to procrastinate about organizing larger, more comfortable societies.

It seems only logical that several civilizations the equal of the Maya, the Chinese, or the Romans rose and fell, leaving nearly no trace.
When one leaves all the physical evidence out in the rain for 50,000 years, there is not much left to see.

I love watching the "ancient alien" shows from this view point.
Those Nazca lines, Baghdad batteries, and stone-embedded metal screws seem more likely to be from long lost human societies than extraterrestrial tourists.

My hypothesis has no evidence, it is pure armchair philosophy, but I hold it none the less.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I cling to a totally unsupported speculation which I pulled straight out of my own butt years ago, that advanced human civilizations have come and gone several times and we have no trace of them left.
Biologically modern homo sapiens have been on earth for at least 160,000 years, maybe 250,000 years.
Those were people just like you and me.

I don't accept that those folks just sat around primitive fires for 155,000 years and only then jumped up and got busy with the one-and-only neolithic revolution 5,000 years ago.
1,500 centuries is a damn long time to procrastinate about organizing larger, more comfortable societies.

It seems only logical that several civilizations the equal of the Maya, the Chinese, or the Romans rose and fell, leaving nearly no trace.
When one leaves all the physical evidence out in the rain for 50,000 years, there is not much left to see.

I love watching the "ancient alien" shows from this view point.
Those Nazca lines, Baghdad batteries, and stone-embedded metal screws seem more likely to be from long lost human societies than extraterrestrial tourists.

My hypothesis has no evidence, it is pure armchair philosophy, but I hold it none the less.

Hancock believes that there was a "master civilization" if you want to call it atlantis or whatever that flourished then was destroyed in the flood that so many ancient texts (bible, gilgamesh) etc speak of.

Only a few from this civilization survived and they fanned out across the world ending up in different places and igniting each of these ancient civilizations that all share common traits yet were separated by oceans.

This would be consistent with all major ancient civilizations creation stories. For example the Inca/Mochi had one man named Viracocha who came to them and taught them everything he knew. He was "a man of medium height, white and dressed in a white robe like an alb secured round the waist, and that he carried a staff and a book in his hands."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viracocha

Incidentally when Pizarro showed up in the Incan homeland they first mistook him for Viracocha (because he wore spanish garb, medium height with a beard and he was white) and invited him into their lives. Plus the fact they had never seen horses before scared them.

[touchring]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I don't accept that those folks just sat around primitive fires for 155,000 years and only then jumped up and got busy with the one-and-only neolithic revolution 5,000 years ago.
1,500 centuries is a damn long time to procrastinate about organizing larger, more comfortable societies.

It seems only logical that several civilizations the equal of the Maya, the Chinese, or the Romans rose and fell, leaving nearly no trace.
When one leaves all the physical evidence out in the rain for 50,000 years, there is not much left to see.

Stone structures such as fortification and tombs can last for tens of thousands of years. I doubt there are civilizations as large and advance as the Chinese or Romans and not leave behind any trace. Unless they built all fortifications using wood. Chinese buildings that are not forts are wooden structures, that's why there are very few Chinese structures, pagodas that are more than a thousand years old.

[c1ue]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

I'll just note that if the definition of 'advanced civilization' assumes some reasonably large population of people - the works necessary to support said population are large enough that even time will not be able to easily obscure them.

I'm not talking about stone pyramids, but dams/irrigation/roads.

In general, large populations of people also require some form of input - whether it is clay for pottery, stone for tools, etc. These also don't disappear.

There are instances where advanced cultures vanish - but traces definitely still remain. The successive waves of invaders into Britain, for example, obliterated almost all modern cultural references, but both genetic and traditional archaeology have revealed that these other cultures existed. The people didn't disappear, they just got subsumed into what are called Brits today (really more Welsh).

Or put another way - places where populations thrived don't generally go empty.

[mooncliff]

Re: Spectacular civilization 2000 years ago, vanished

30 years of floods followed by 30 years of drought