I was watching the History Channel this weekend and they apparently have this whole series called Ancient Astronauts. Basically it's Chariots of the Gods type of stuff, arguments that aliens visited the Earth, showed manking how to build meglithic structures and what not, and then promptly disappeared for reasons unknown. Now the ancient aliens crap doesn't interest as much as the lost knowledge a lot of these people base their 'theories' on. It got me thinking about ball point pens and the pyramids.
What I mean by that is, a thousand years from now and assuming some massive disaster that nearly wiped out modern civilization, ball point pens would be incredible archeological finds. They'd be ubiquitous, however no one would likely know how we made them. Similar to some ancient structures. It struck me that a consequence of the free market is that specialization might lead to such lost knowledge. Think about it, we likely all use ball point pens every day, but does anyone know how to make one? It's specialized knowledge which would likely be lost if a comet wiped out most of our civilization. Perhaps never to be rediscovered.
So that got me thinking, what if free markets were way more common in ancient times? The main stream presumption seems to be that all things revolved around religion and centrally directed economies run by despots and/or powerful priests and what not. However, if markets were relatively free a long time ago then they would have lead to specialization, as they do now. Which if you add some catastrophic event which lead to massive loss of life and consider the information storage restraints fo the time could explain why so much knowledge seems to be lost. Specifics about the construction of the pyramids and other such ruins such as Pumapunku, those could easily have been lost if trades were highly specialized, just like we'd likely lose the specifics of ball point pen construction if our civilization was virtually wiped out.
It seems most here are familiar with Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions and the fact that lost knowledge is not only possible but common. So, if you have a situation where the highly specialized intellectual capital of a civilization gets flushed for some catastrophic reason, and the physical capital is simply not that durable for the most part, you end up with the remains of the stuff that could endure such as ruins and artifacts, a few remaining pieces of literature or history perhaps, and a mysterious vacuum of knowledge which would likely lead those in the future to underestimate what those in the past were capable of.
I remember reading recently that Egyptian slaves may have actually been free laborers, are there any history books that go into this type of thing much at all that anyone has read? Minus the aliens.
Cool ideas. I just watched Chariots of the Gods and think this stuff is really interesting...and probably doesn't involve aliens. This book talks about aliens, sorry, but there are probably other interesting theories in it (I haven't read it).
I'm definitely inclined these days to believe our ancestors were more advanced than they've been given credit for.