A little over 2,000 years ago was the height of Rome. 2,000 years before that the dominant empire not that far from there was Assyria. 2,000 years before that it was Mesopotamia and woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. This is about our limit of recorded history as the earliest surviving writing (actually pictographs) is from ~3500 BC.
Obviously there was history before then and we can really only see evidence of this from surviving archaeological evidence (as per this article). So another 2,000 years before Msopotamia we've found remains of Neolithic villages that are now under the English Channel.
And yet we're still 4,000 after the ruins from this article. It's wild. Stonework has a tendency to last. Wood obviously wouldn't. You really wonder how long humans have really been in permanen tsettlements and we can only imagine what life was like then, what language they had and what they believed.
And to put it in even more perspective, if the entire history of Earth as a whole year, all of the above happened in the last 83 seconds.
To put that in perspective, 2000 years is roughly how long it took humans to question/revisit Aristotle’s 4 element theory - captured in the The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes. That was written less than 400 years ago. It’s amazing how slow things moved until the 1600s and the explosion of progress that’s followed.
No. Aristotles 4 element theory was that there are two dichotomies of matter: wet/dry and hot/cold. From these they derived the 4 elements:
* cold + dry: earth
* cold + wet: water
* hot + dry: fire
* hot + wet: air
These were not states of matter. They were the base components of matter - everything was made by some combination of these 4 elements, and everything could be broken down into some proportion of these 4 individual elements.
A big part of what caused humanity to stagnate for 2000 years post-Aristotle was the tendency to back-propagate discoveries and attribute new knowledge to the ancients. Aristotle was wrong. The Greeks were wrong about most things. That’s fine - we are too. Even if you can twist their conclusions in an attempt to reconcile them with modern constructs - their methods used to reach their conclusions very much missed the mark. Trying to give them more credit than what is due is how you cause society to stagnate for another 2000 years.
In the 1600s a spin off of Alchemy proposed the 3 element theory - and found quite a bit of success using it for medicine: Quicksilver, Alchemical Mercury, and Alchemical Salt. A lot of people were really upset about this theory. They’d never really had to defend ancient wisdom before - they’d spent 2000 years assuming ancient wisdom was complete. They went to work attempting to disprove the 3 element theory, which they successfully did. But, in their attempt to disprove the 3 element theory, they accidentally laid the groundwork for disproving the 4 element theory.
For a concrete example. It turns out the alchemists were correct: transmutation is possible. When you split an atom (I.e. in a nuclear reactor) you transmutate the element. That’s not the same as saying the Alchemists were right - they were looking for a red dust made from a pulverized piece of pure earth that could turn copper into gold. They were correct for the wrong reasons - that is not the same as being right. They were lucky in their conclusion and wrong in their methods.
> A big part of what caused humanity to stagnate for 2000 years post-Aristotle was the tendency to back-propagate discoveries and attribute new knowledge to the ancients. Aristotle was wrong. The Greeks were wrong about most things. That’s fine - we are too. Even if you can twist their conclusions in an attempt to reconcile them with modern constructs - their methods used to reach their conclusions very much missed the mark. Trying to give them more credit than what is due is how you cause society to stagnate for another 2000 years.
I disagree. Not that ancients can be wrong, but the idea that appreciating their knowledge held back society for 2000 years (I think it is just the opposite, as seen by how the rediscovery of Plato, Aristotle and Hermes catalyzed the enlightenment). If you understand Plato, you appreciate that it is a dialectic—there isn’t a singular truth presented, but provocations for thought. Now, Aristotle doesn’t leave so much room for that, but I’m less an expert on Aristotle than the Pythagoreans— who originated the four element theory, heliocentrism, emergence from a singularity and the notion that the world is composed of math, not matter.
For instance, the idea of the 5 elements came from the idea that there are only 5 simple Platonic solids. The simplest mathematical 3D shapes should be the simplest physical forms, right? And the geometry of their construction should lead to their material properties, right? They got this right— except that it took nonEuclidean geometry— atoms are composed of the simplest geometries (spherical harmonics in the electron shells) and their geometric properties do govern their material properties.
And, the universe did come from an ineffable oneness or singularity.
And the harmonies in the cosmos do derive from harmonies in basic mathematics.
It was precisely these ideas, when rediscovered, that led to Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion, kicking off the scientific revolution.
Their core method was dialectic. Their conclusions are modern science. Many other issues stagnated science — dictatorship, religion, economic collapse, war. Appreciation for ancient philosophy was almost always a basis for advancement of the dialectic, not dogmatism.
It's fascinating to think about the past in this fast backwards fashion, I love it (and also fast forwarding from past to present).
What you said about the language reminded me of this video about PIE language, I speak some European languages and it's amazing that many words feel so familiar. And it's even nicer to read the comments, all that people from around the world finding stuff so close in their native modern language!
Are you sure your timeline is correct? Assyria as an empire is closer to -1400 to -700, with the dominant part coming after -1000.
Similarly, there was no "Mesopotamian empire" in -4000 that I'm aware of: before -2000 I think it was mostly city states all around the near east.
Their timeline is definitely incorrect beyond Rome. "2000 years before Rome" was the period of dominance of the Akkadian Empire of Sargon, and right afterwards of the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur. You are correct about Assyria and the Mesopotamian warring cities.
You are ignoring the extremely detailed recording of history in the Indian subcontinent. Events, including the kings/queens that ruled over the Gangetic plains, their sons & lineage, wars, migrations, volcanic eruptions, weather changes (floods, earthquakes etc) have been VERY meticulously recorded as Itihāsa - Sanskrit for "It so happened". This goes back to at least 27,000 years before present - firmly placing the Indian subcontinent as the root of all of current human civilization. Why would you ignore such a vast & undeniable evidence, unless your "recorded history" is deemed to be Greek centric and not universal? That is hardly history!!
Obviously there was history before then and we can really only see evidence of this from surviving archaeological evidence (as per this article). So another 2,000 years before Msopotamia we've found remains of Neolithic villages that are now under the English Channel.
And yet we're still 4,000 after the ruins from this article. It's wild. Stonework has a tendency to last. Wood obviously wouldn't. You really wonder how long humans have really been in permanen tsettlements and we can only imagine what life was like then, what language they had and what they believed.
And to put it in even more perspective, if the entire history of Earth as a whole year, all of the above happened in the last 83 seconds.