I need to bet to bed--it's 1:44 am. But here's a little thinky story for you.
So this morning, I took the train up to Rogers Park and was walking around. Against the blue sky I saw an abandoned water tower. There was no top on it--just the big metal spider legs with a ladder crawling up one side. The water tank itself was gone. I didn't take a picture--probably should have, but it was sort of like this, but taller and from farther away, and obviously with no tank:
The image was striking, and it piqued my imagination. (I love when that happens.) It got me to thinking about the artifacts, like this watertower, that a civilization leaves behind. I mean, our modern, Western civilization would leave behind a whole junkyard full of crap if our society ever fell into ruin.
What if--thousands of years from now, hundreds of thousands of years fom now--what if our current civilization were to fail and eventually get buried and forgotten in the sands of time, and then much later, it was unearthed by someone else? What would that someone think if they saw the remains of our society? Would they know what everything was, what it was for? What it meant to us and why we made it? How would they ever guess? If they saw a laptop computer, might they just as easily assume it was a plate, or a seat, or a cooking press?
The water tower, in particular, intrigues me. How would another civilization see that structure? You know, maybe they would think, since they couldn't fathom another purpose, that it was religiously motivated. A big tall altar to make sacrifices to the gods on. That's what we think, after all, when we see similar, unexplainable structures in the ancient world. They'd be wrong though.
So, then, since we're on the subject, I've got a related question. Who's to say we don't have it wrong about everyone else? What if the Aztec pyramids were not religious at all, but utilitarian? Like water towers? Or grain storage, or salt-drying houses? If we're wrong--and we may not be (I haven't researched--it's possible archaeologists have discovered religious writings on the sides of them or some such... but I'm not going to take the time to look them up)--well anyway, but if we are wrong, it's a little too easy, and elitist, almost, to have attributed them as religious. "Look at this backwards, quaint civilization," we say--"How silly they were with the big tall temples to the sky where they thought the gods lived." Well, maybe they were just water towers, or something else entirely.
What is the quote? Any technology, if sufficiently advanced, will appear to the uninitiated observer as indistinguishable from magic? How about: Any ancient artifact, taken without context, will be assumed by the discoverer to be for a religious purpose, if the discovering culture can't--with their current schema--conceive of anything else it could be used for.
Or not. But something to ponder.
Mood: Whimsical, history-of-the-world-type thinky, pondery
I don't know if you check this ever, or if you're ever going to write in here again, but I just read all the posts and wanted to comment.
ReplyDeleteI just heard a RadioLab about the junk-leftover-for-future-generations-to-discover thing. They actually found a huge landfill from like 1000 years ago. And there are mostly disintegrated bits of paper with writing on it and stuff. Pretty interesting.