The Overwhelming Evidence for Lost Civilizations
Shirley Andrews discusses the evidence for lost civilizations, it is overwhelming and we need to ask the questions, why did they disappear and what message have they left for us.
Linda Howe has an AMAZING interview with a close encounter witness
There have been many explanations put forward for the collapse of civilization. Some focus on historical examples, and others on general theory.
Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah influenced theories of the analysis, growth and decline of the
Islamic civilization. He suggested repeated invasions from nomadic peoples limited development and led to social collapse.
Edward Gibbon's work
The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire was a well-known and detailed analysis of the fall of
Roman civilization. Gibbon suggested the final act of the collapse of
Rome was the fall of
Constantinople to the
Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. For Gibbon:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.[Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed., vol. 4, ed. by
J. B. Bury (
London,
1909), pp. 173--174.-Chapter
XXXVIII:
Reign Of
Clovis.--Part VI.
General Observations On
The Fall Of
The Roman Empire In The West.]
Theodor Mommsen in his "
History of Rome (Mommsen)", suggested Rome collapsed with the collapse of the
Western Roman Empire in 476 CE and he also tended towards a biological analogy of "genesis," "growth," "senescence," "collapse" and "decay."
Oswald Spengler, in his "
Decline of the West" rejected
Petrarch's chronological division, and suggested that there had been only eight "mature civilizations."
Growing cultures, he argued, tend to develop into imperialistic civilizations which expand and ultimately collapse, with democratic forms of government ushering in plutocracy and ultimately imperialism.
Arnold J. Toynbee in his "
A Study of History" suggested that there had been a much larger number of civilizations, including a small number of arrested civilizations, and that all civilizations tended to go through the cycle identified by Mommsen. The cause of the fall of a civilization occurred when a cultural elite became a parasitic elite, leading to the rise of internal and external proletariats.
Joseph Tainter in "
The Collapse of Complex Societies" suggested that there were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the
2nd century CE.
Peter Heather argues in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: a
New History of Rome and the
Barbarians that this civilization did not end for moral or economic reasons, but because centuries of contact with barbarians across the frontier generated its own nemesis by making them a much more sophisticated and dangerous adversary. The fact that Rome needed to generate ever greater revenues to equip and re-equip armies that were for the first time repeatedly defeated in the field, led to the dismemberment of the
Empire. Although this argument is specific to Rome, it can also be applied to the Asiatic Empire of the
Egyptians, to the Han and
Tang dynasties of
China, to the Muslim
Abbasid Caliphate, and others.
Bryan Ward-Perkins, in his book
The Fall of Rome and the
End of Civilization, shows the real horrors associated with the collapse of a civilization for the people who suffer its effects, unlike many revisionist historians who downplay this. The collapse of complex society meant that even basic plumbing disappeared from the continent for
1,000 years.
Similar Dark Age collapses are seen with the
Late Bronze Age collapse in the
Eastern Mediterranean, the collapse of the
Maya, on
Easter Island and elsewhere.
Arthur Demarest argues in
Ancient Maya:
The Rise and Fall of a
Rainforest Civilization, using a holistic perspective to the most recent evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, and epigraphy, that no one explanation is sufficient but that a series of erratic, complex events, including loss of soil fertility, drought and rising levels of internal and external violence led to the disintegration of the courts of
Mayan kingdoms which began a spiral of decline and decay
. .