The idea of the continuous and cyclic rise and fall of Civilisations was first penned by Ibn Khaldūn, as I posted about before, but there is perhaps no better illustration of this than ‘The Course of Empire,’ a series of five paintings done by Thomas Cole 500 years later in 1833-1836.

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The Sumerians produced the world’s “first high civilization” and were the world’s first urban non-Semitic people with the earliest traces of them found as far back as 5300BC. This ancient culture spanned the fifth to the second millennium BC in and around ancient Mesopotamia (mainly modern day Iraq but also stretching to Turkey, Syria and Iran) and its scientific and literary achievements had lasting influence throughout the ancient world and down through today.

The Sumerians were the first people to have a complex system of metrology which resulted in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They referred to themselves as the sag-giga, which literally meant “the black-headed people. The cities of Sumer were the first to practice rigorous, year-round agriculture.

What I find fascinating is that as late as the 19th century, the Sumerian culture was completely unknown.  Sumer had “been erased from the mind and memory of man for more than two thousand years.” That is, up until around a Hundred years ago, we had no idea of where we came from. It is clear that what we dont know is still far greater than we do know about our early histroy,  but a lot of the knowledge we have was brought to light with the discovery of  the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh where 30, 000 clay tablets were found.

Another thing I find fascinating, is that the earliest Leaders of Sumeria, who lived amongst, and ruled over the people, were Deified, that is, they were gods. These were Dumuzi, a deity whose worship would have profound influences in Judaism and in Greek mythology, and Gilgamesh, the “supreme hero of Sumerian myth and legend,” his deeds written and rewritten not only in Sumerian but also in other languages.

Sargon the Great was the conqueror (7000 years later we are still fighting over these lands!) that finally brought about the end of the Sumerian people as “an identifiable political and ethnic entity” and began the “Semitization of Sumer.” He went on to later build babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Sumerians believed that rite and ritual were more important than either personal devotion or piety, and that man was “created for no other purpose than to serve the gods.” Bear in mind, these gods were not some abstract entity, but according to the Sumerians, they created the first people, lived amongst and ruled over them.

I have two fascinating books about the Sumerians. Both of which I would highly recommend, this one and this one.

Image by Raphael Lacoste

The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved ancient law code, created ca. 1790 BC in ancient Babylon. Hammurabi said he was chosen by the gods to deliver the law to his people, in a story cited as the likely starting point for the Ten Commandments which was written almost 2000 years later.

Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406 C.E.) –  was a North African polymath — an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer, mathematician, military strategist, nutritionist, philosopher, social scientist and statesman (!!!!!!!) —born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia. He retreated into the desert in 1375 and emerged four years later having written one of the most important ever studies of the workings of history.

This volume, commonly known as Muqaddimah or ‘Prolegomena’, became a masterpiece in literature on philosophy of history and sociology. The chief concern of this monumental work was to identify psychological, economic, environmental and social facts that contribute to the advancement of human civilization and the currents of history. In this context, he analysed the dynamics of group relationships and showed how group-feelings, al-’Asabiyya, give rise to the ascent of a new civilisation and political power and how, later on, its diffusion into a more general civilization invites the advent of a still new ‘Asabiyya in its pristine form. He identified an almost rhythmic repetition of rise and fall in human civilization, and analysed factors contributing to it.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings seem particularly relevant today after reading this:
Endgame

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

Joseph Davidovits (born 1935) is a French materials scientist who has posited that the blocks of the Great Pyramid are not carved stone, but mostly a form of limestone concrete. He holds the Ordre National du Mérite, is the author and co-author of more than 130 scientific papers and conferences reports, and holds more than fifty patents.

Davidovits was not convinced that the ancient Egyptians possessed the tools or technology to carve and haul the huge (2.5 to 15 ton) limestone blocks that made up the Great Pyramid. Davidovits suggested that the blocks were molded in place by using a form of limestone concrete. According to his theory, a soft limestone with a high kaolinite content was quarried in the wadi on the south of the Giza plateau. It was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry. Lime (found in the ash of ancient cooking fires) and natron (also used by the Egyptians in mummification) was mixed in. The pools were then left to evaporate, leaving behind a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet “concrete” would be carried to the construction site where it would be packed into reusable wooden molds. In the next few days the mixture would undergo a chemical hydration reaction similar to the setting of cement.

This would account for the unerring precision of the joints of the casing stones (the blocks of the core show tools marks and were cut with much lower tolerances). Proof-of-concept experiments using similar compounds were carried out at Davidovit’s geopolymer institute in northern France. It was found that a crew of ten, working with simple hand tools, could build a structure of fourteen, 1.3 to 4.5 ton blocks in a couple of days. According to Davidovits the architects possessed at least two concrete formulas: one for the large structural blocks and another for the white casing stones. He argues earlier pyramids, brick structures, and stone vases were built using similar techniques.

Joseph Davidovits sweeps aside the conventional image which cripples Egyptology and delivers a captivating and surprising view of Egyptian civilisation. He charts the rise of this technology, its apogee with the Pyramids at Giza, and the decline.

What I would like to know, is how could they know this technology almost 5,000 years ago? Was it the remnant of an even older (Global) knowledge which was used to build The Trilithon at Baalbeck (12,500BC) as well as other structures and cities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, South America? How did this knowledge come to be lost? If it was something the ancients knew, why, in this modern scientific age has it taken us so long to figure it out? 

Stopped by recently for a walk around the British museum and although there is some really great stuff there the section I went specifically to see containing the ancient Sumerian relics was closed for renovation. Boo!

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Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.

The Sumerians practiced a polytheistic religion, with anthropomorphic gods or goddesses representing forces or presences in the world, in much the same way as later Greek mythology. According to said mythology, the gods originally created humans as servants for themselves but freed them when they became too much to handle.

Many stories in Sumerian religion appear similar to stories in other Middle-Eastern religions. For example, the Biblical account of the creation of man as well as Noah’s flood resemble the Sumerian tales very closely. Gods and Goddesses from Sumer have distinctly similar representations in the religions of the Akkadians, Canaanites, and others. A number of stories and deities have Greek parallels as well; for example, it has been argued by some that Inanna’s descent into the underworld strikingly recalls (and predates) the story of Persephone.

According to Sayce:^[1] Don “In historical Babylonia the gods were in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men.”

Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deification took place during their life-time, in fact, so far as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give themselves the title of god.”

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.

Continue reading the New Scientist article here…

Aurorae are produced by the collision of charged particles from Earth’s magnetosphere, they originate from the Sun and arrive at Earth in solar winds.

In one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula.

Egyptians honored Amun-Ra as king of the gods and creator of the universe. They also believed him to be the father of the pharaohs, who were referred to as “Sons of Ra”. The cult of Amun-Ra remained strong throughout Egypt until almost the time of Jesus. The ancient Greeks associated Amun-Ra with Zeus, their own supreme god.

The Egyptians valued gold, not for it’s rarity, as we do, but for it’s color. It was used to represent the power of the sun, and was thought to connect them with the sun god Amun-Ra.

AMEN comes from Egypt’s ancient sun god Amun-ra.

“The Christian church is an encyclopedia of prehistoric cults.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century.

In their journal report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt concluded that by the 15th century, Islamic designers and artisans had developed techniques “to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before discovery in the West.”

Some of the most complex patterns, called “girih” in Persian, consist of sets of contiguous polygons fitted together with little distortion and no gaps. Running through each polygon (a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie or hexagon) is a decorative line. Mr. Lu found that the interlocking tiles were arranged in predictable ways to create a pattern that never repeats — that is, quasi crystals.

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I wonder how you do a minus sign. Could do some cool number system -273 tshirts.