Do you ever think of us as people of ancient times?

[sharptoothlemonshark]

I love history and love picturing and imagining people hundreds or thousands of years ago, going about their lives, enjoying fun and love, and coping with fear and danger. I have some roman/ viking/tudor/victorian artifacts, and feel like these bring me really close to people of the past, touching what they touched and made, and knowing how the same we are really, in spite of the distances between us.

Then I think of us as ancient people, from the point of view of people hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and I can almost feel their curiosity and concern about us that they will almost certainly be sending our way in the future. I look at my keyboard I am on right now, for example, and wonder if maybe the f key, or similar might eventually find its way into the hand of a history lover in the year 3024, and they might hold it with the fascination and reverence that I feel for my viking comb, and use it to feel that he or she can almost form a connection to me.

Anyone else get these feelings?

Why?

Imagine printing out all those documents and photos into physical form

I had a conversation with DH about this just yesterday. He’d overheard the bar staff in the old pub he was in talking about the resident ghosts.
He was saying how he can’t possibly believe but knows I’m interested in that kind of thing.

I was trying to explain how to me ghost stories are interesting not because I believe the dead are walking amongst us, but because I love that the history of the building gets to tell its story. How these wonderful old buildings and places have seen so much change yet there they still stand unable to speak about what’s it’s seen.

I love to touch the bricks of old buildings and think about the people that have touched it before me. I find comfort in it somehow 🤷🏻‍♀️

I do! Have written a few articles about archeological discoveries, and they're always my favourites to do.
I'm loving the book recommendations scattered amidst this thread.

What evidence is there that ancient man had a casual attitude to murder? I mean, that's definitely wrong. The human instinct is not to murder, hence why it's illegal everywhere in the world.

@ginasevern I'd love to see that. I am not sure, but wonder if that land was part of Doggerland. The mesolithic people there had to move due to rising sea levels, so maybe this family was heading to what we now know as Europe? It's amazing to think of forests, settlements and artefacts that lie secretly in the sea.

@PurpleOrchid42 I wondered that too, whether it was an assumption or whether there's evidence of frequent massacres or something similar. I've heard of skulls found with evidence of a blow to the head, and I imagine an altercation could end that way. But whether it was frequent and acceptable I don't know.

Modern civilization probably won't but some studies reckon we've been reduced to a few thousand worldwide before, maybe even repeatedly

I love the mundaneness of ancient artifacts, such as the Roman soldier stationed at Hadrian’s wall who writes home to his mother that the weather is awful, he’s cold and can she send him some socks.

Or the ancient Mesopotamian tablet, written 3800 years ago by a teenage boy complaining to his mother that his clothes aren’t as nice as those of his friends.

https://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/2838747/tiktok-ancient-letter-teens/

Having seen a primary school assembly where children studying "the Tudors" act the stories of Henry VIII and his wives, I often wonder about the school assemblies of the future. I like to think they will perform the Charles and Diana story, so they will get to study the people of the end if of the 20th century. But I imagine their costumes will be a little bit inaccurate, with some 60s mini skirts or maybe evacuee Fair Isle jumpers, just as we lump whole centuries together.

This morning I put my hair up in a bun and noticed my grandmother's face in the mirror! She had the same style in photos from a hundred years ago. I look more like her than I do my mum.

@sharptoothlemonshark

I've Noticed certain people who i know or don't know out and about have features that are remisant of old masters medieval paintings and other types of paintings ive come across..

quite intriguing 🤔 they have olde worlde features in contemporary life

@BigMandsTattooPortfolio Yes, this is what sends me down black holes of inner contemplation. Some of the most memorable points for me have been these.
The Genizah Archive - incomprehensibly ancient written legal evidence showing a marriage of an Abraham and Sarah in thousands of similar legal 'docs', and then another layer coming up with a writ about the divorce of an Abraham and Sarah;

An exhibit of a Bronze Age item reconstructed in modern times. Essentially it is a pot handle, you use 2 to slot into the holes either side of a cooking pot over a fire to lift it, but it's like a hand sized metal heart with a good gap between the 2 rounded top edges. For its function, there is very little that could be bettered. It wouldn't break easily. It's also beautiful and looks as if you could string lots together to make a necklace.

Some things where function can only be guessed, that have become properly defunct because the whole structure around them is over and gone, such as anything for lamp or firelighting, making dairy items in a dairy before cold storage, coal and chemicals, even, for the time's speeding technologies.

Oh, and the cosmic awfulness that Franz Kafka (of Kafka fame) was poetically unhappy in the legal and insurance businesses he tried to start out in, after his student years. His family did him a favour to help him get out of there even if walking away from good jobs was trying their patience. So plan C was... his brother's asbestos factory, and the likely cause of the lung disease that ended his life.

I suppose Pepys did that, or at least anyone from the age of (relatively, male) mass literacy onwards.
Not disagreeing by the way, that was just what your comment made me think of.
Writing is such a fascinating thing. Before that we disappeared with the sunset. After it, a whisper remains.

Yes. I think about it quite often. But I also reckon we won't survive as a species far enough into the future for them to think this far back. Not sure that makes sense! Hopefully you understand what I mean!

When I do housework I sometimes imagine showing a woman from an earlier times a washing machine, a hot water tap, a television -our everyday 'artifacts' - and wondering how astonished she'd be.

We have all these amazing things, but we as individuals can't build them or even really understand how they work. But those foremothers could grow crops, spin wool, slaughter and preserve animals, keep their families alive though bitter times (climate and politics). We panic if the wifi goes down for a day.

Yes. If you think back to the first half of the 20th Century, we had 2 world wars and a flu pandemic but by the end of the century the population was higher than it had ever been.

Latest evidence is that the global birth rate is slowing slightly, China are now trying to encourage people to have children as the one child policy proved too successful (albeit with forced abortions and killing of female babies). Japan has a similar problem where young professionals don't have the income or space to have more than one child.

One of my guilty pleasures is Regency romance and I sometimes wonder how someone from that era would view modern travel. When rail travel was first invented people thought that travel over 25 mph would be deadly. Modern air travel would be terrifying.

One of my favourite films is Les Visiteurs where Jean Reno's character gets thrown forward 800 years.

I get that's kind of the opposite of what the OP is asking but I suppose people are people and we can't undo 100,000 years of evolution in a few hundred years. (Although we could well destroy the planet).

I do ceramics and I keep thinking I should make something that depicts today because pottery survives ages without deteriorating. Not sure what to make yet though.

@sharptoothlemonshark
Very intriguing 🤔 mumsnet thread idea
could end up going into intellectual Alice in wonderland rabbit hole...