A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. The Jade Cabbage was the headline attraction at the time. The thing that stood out the most to me was a tea cup. The date was ~1800. I was impressed by a 215 year old tea cup. Then I realized the date was 1800 bc. A 3800 year old cup!
I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
Two years ago, my wife and I visited the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. We were on our way out when I saw a door that branched to a room of "deep antiquities", or words to that effect.
One of the exhibits consisted of three gold bracelets - beautiful, modern designs that would have looked at home in a window at Tiffany's. They had been excavated from strata with charcoal that dated at ~6,000 - 5,000 BC.
That single exhibit imbued in me a feeling of connection to our human past as much as has a lifetime of interest in history.
I'm native American, visiting Sequoia national Park being among the ancient forests I literally start to hear the songs and the war drums of my people. One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
> One of the most amazing experiences of my life I always thought Richard fineman was crazy for beating a bongo drum. But he was on to something.
Not crazy at all. Dancing, singing, music is part of just about every human culture. I'd even say dancing is a sort of fun communal therapy. Which makes total sense why its part of ceremony.
Note, Many people such as myself claim they don't dance. But secretly I "dance" (thrash about incoherently) around the when the music is going and no one is looking.
This is the magic of dark European clubs that ban phones and are designed around hiding the identities of their inhabitants, versus bright American clubs designed to see and be seen.
Thrashing about incoherently is just a sign that you’ve lost yourself in the music, and is exactly what you’re going for.
Berghain is a meme at this point, but fuck, I’ve never experienced anything like the communal trance that happens in there.
I had a similar experience at an Egyptian exhibit at the museum in Victoria. They had statues and stonework dating from the 2000's BC. At the time i was doing stonework, polishing and cutting granite and marble and stuff.
The polish and cuts on the statues were as good if not better than some of the stuff we produced with machines and power tools, and it gave me this sense of awe and made me realize people had been doing the same thing i spent every day doing for thousands and thousands of years.
> I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.
Indonedia, Turkey and Egypt are next for you if you want your mind blown; the monolithic structures there are way older and far more intricate than a cup and are going back +10,000 years: Gunung Padang, Gobekli Tepe and possibly some of the older Egyptian Pyramids if you follow modern archeological studies on time periods that depict water erosion from rain in the Nile.
Graham Hancock's work is what confirmed my innate intuition that Agriculture has to be older than the claimed ~10,000 years as it is just to complex of a technology and a Scientific discipline to not be: these monoliths are a testament of Human ingenuity as that complex level of division of labour and highly specialized engineering, infrastructure and planning are only possible because of surpluses of food and water in civilization. Everyone I know that's been there dismisses the propaganda that the pyramids were 'built by slaves' as it falls flat on its face when they see the level of intricacy and precision required to build a symmetrical pyramid with no variation its construction, its baffling to me that for all of our amazing technology we struggle to come close to this day using modern tools and equipment and probably can't make something similar from those materials. And yet there it is a monolith that stood the test of time and is only a dull glimmer of what it was in it's peak when Egypt served as the beacon for Human knowledge but also serves as a reminder of what we're capable of when we collectively apply ourselves to an endeavor that defies all possible expectations of what is/was thought to be possible. And we still haven't excavated most of what is at Gunung Padang as it goes down very deep and is only visualized through radar.
I've never been myself, but I hope to go to all 3.
In the archaeological museum in Chania, Crete, i saw this pull-along toy cow, which wouldn't look all that out of place today, and is four thousand years old:
It's not an artifact exactly, but the Happisburgh footprints, discovered not far from me, gave me a visceral feeling of just how deep human time is. They are a set of fossilized hominid footprints made in the Norfolk mud 800,000 years ago. In the UK, there's old stuff all over the place (I live in a house that was built in the late 17th Century) so you get used to it, but 800,000 years is a length of time I find it hard to conceive of.
I had a similar experience in Japan last year when I learned the same family has ruled for something like 1500 years and trace their history back 2600 years.