Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Athenian Stranger: Next follows the principle that the noble should rule over the ignoble; and, thirdly, that the elder should rule and the younger obey?
Cleinias: To be sure.
Athenian Stranger: And, fourthly, that slaves should be ruled, and
their masters rule?
Cleinias: Of course.
Athenian Stranger: Fifthly, if I am not mistaken, comes the principle that the stronger shall rule, and the weaker be ruled?
Cleinias: That is a rule not to be disobeyed.
— Plato, Laws, dialogue

Thirty thousand years ago, there was a civilisation on Earth that had achieved certain technological accomplishments with which we, today, are again somewhat familiar.  A very small elite had enormous power, wealth, and abilities at their command.  They had access to the Solar System, they had nuclear weapons, they had communications devices that incorporated quantum entanglement, their technologists had a deep and significant understanding of the multi-dimensional reality in which we live.  They also had an extraordinarily sick, hierarchical, and demented society.

If you want to have a sense of who they were and how they lived, please consult the mythologies of Greece, Carthage, and Ægypt.  Homer does a reasonable job of portraying the deliberately crippled Haephestus making things of great intricacy and beauty for the other powerful entities such as Eris, Athena, Zeus, Hermes, and others.  The wedding celebration on Mount Olympus describes the golden apple that Haephestus created for Eris, the golden dancing girl robots he built, the serving machines that rolled from one divan to another with nectar and ambrosia, and most of all a sense of the jealousies, inhumanity, and viciousness of these beings.  Later in the Iliad, Homer describes a shield given by Athena to Achilles, on the surface of which are moving images.

Essentially all of the ancient writings of the Greeks display a clear understanding that their culture had risen from a dark age that followed a much higher and greater civilisation.  Many of the texts, such as the Edfu building texts, in Ægypt make it clear that the Ægyptians believed that their progenitor monarchs had fled from an island city which had been destroyed thousands of years earlier.

Now, you are free to believe whatever it is you wish to believe.  I also think that you don't have to live like a refugee.  Graham Hancock says that we are a species with amnesia, but I'm not sure that's so.  There is abundant evidence that at least some people on Earth have been in possession of the facts of our long history, reaching back some 300,000 years.

My purpose here is not to convince you, but to share with you a story of the before time, a story of what went on before the supposed beginnings of "civilisation" as it has come to be called, in the sense of people living in cities (civitas).  My particular attention in this essay will be on the period from the destruction of Atlantis some 9,600 years BC to the time of the Sumerians about 4,000 BC.  But to set that in context, I'll review what I think is true about the times before.  You may wish to think of this essay as the outline of an alternate timeline hypothesis about mankind's past, or as the setting for a series of science fiction novels, as you wish.  You are a free and sovereign individual, and reading this essay for entertainment and some change in perspective is a choice you are making for yourself.

Origins

We simply don't know how far back in time homo sapiens appeared on Earth as a species.  This information is probably going to become available in various ways, and we may find out.  We do know that for many of the last 300,000 years there have been ice ages on Earth during which a vast amount of fresh water was locked into ice sheets that were miles high and sat on the northern latitudes of North America, Europe, parts of Asia, Greenland, and Antarctica.  These ice sheets held water that would otherwise have flowed into the global ocean, and water levels were in places hundreds of feet lower than we see them today.

Also we have known that our species had an ancestor that was some sort of aquatic ape, because to this day we have hair that forms patterns suited to a swimming mammal, we have a dunking reflex so that infants dropped into water hold their breath, we are highly adapted to life in estuaries.  Accordingly, we tend to be shore dwelling animals.  Also, we've learned that there is approximately one thirtieth as much energy used transporting the same cargo by sea or river as there is transporting it by land even using very good wheeled vehicles with effective bearings.  We've lived mostly (80% of us) at or near the sea, along river valleys, and on islands all over Earth for as long as we've been on Earth as a species.

Since the shorelines used to be much further down the continental shelves than they are now, most of the cities which used to exist were drowned af the end of the Younger Dryas glacial period, about 11,500 years ago.  Some of these cities have been discovered in the Caribbean, on the coast of India, and in the Mediterranean.

What Were Things Like 300,000 Years Ago?

In the past 30,000 years, the Neandertal species of hominid has died out as an independent species.  Some of that genetic heritage remains in some contemporary humans.  The same is true of Denisovan man.  Also about 70,000 years ago homo floriensis died out, probably at the time of the great Toba supervolcano eruption.

There are stories of a lost continent of Mu, although its sinking may reflect one of the periodic interglacial warming periods which have eliminated vast coastal territories as the ice sheets melted.  There is a book which discusses the Greek alphabet that tells the story of Mu's end in fire and water.  Anyway the character "mu" exists in the Greek alphabet.

There was evidently a great deal of travel by African peoples from Africa through to Australia and across the Pacific to South America.  There are people who share genetic history with aboriginal Australians in South America but those genes are not found in people in North America so it is arguable that they didn't come through North America.   Thor Heyerdahl and others have evaluated the ability of ancient Polynesians and ancient Phoenicians to travel across oceans, and compelling evidence exists that there were ancient peoples moving all over the globe with ships of all sizes and shapes.

The Key Lesson of Atlantis

Some centuries after Toba, a globe-spanning empire arose.   It had power, it had technology, it had access to the Solar System, and at one point it was destroyed.  There is today considerable evidence that the Younger Dryas cooling period was caused by an impact on the Grreenland ice sheet, and that another impact took place at the end of the Younger Dryas, in an ocean, and brought about very rapid warming.  The waters came up and wiped out Atlantis.  These were events that involved the sky.  People with the ability to move around in the Solar system would have been able to cause them.

Plato reports, in his dialogues the Timias and the Critias that his ancestor Solon was in Ægypt in 600 BC and learned of Atlantis from the priests of the temples there.  What Solon learned was that Atlantis was destroyed 9,000 years earlier, or about 9,600 BC.  He also learned why it was destroyed.  And that peoples from there had settled in other parts of the world.  Yet, Plato refuses to take this key lesson into account in his subsequent efforts to encourage the development of a "civilisation " along similar lines, with privileged elites, trained warriors, and servile peasants.  The hierarchy, the elitism, the violence, and the oppressive slavery of Atlantis is what brought about its destruction, but Plato and his followers have longed for the creation of a very similar " managed" society.

Seven Sages

After the cataclysmic flooding, and the end of the civilisation that was, there was a period of recovery.  People who had not been close to centres of civilisation, especially hunter gatherers were still around.  And there are stories all over the world of seven sages who brought the ideas and ideals of civilisation to different places.  There survive many records of what these wise beings taught.

They taught freedom, peace, and equality.  They arranged Gobekli Tepe and other places with circular meeting places, with circles of monuments.  In a circle, everyone is equidistant from the centre, so everyone is in some sense equal.  The round houses of Caledonia are symbolic of this same relationship.  For thousands of years, up until about the time of ancient Sumer, most of the people on Earth lived in peaceful communities with no signs of "government" or hierarchy or a dominating priesthood.  There was trade and commerce between these commnities.

These lessons have been ignored, again and again, at our peril.  Empires have risen up and been brought low.  Prophets have come and given warning.  Warnings have been ignored.  Great cities have been destroyed.  Babylon is gone.  Rome fell.  Alexandria burned, several times.  Baghdad was sacked.  Constantinople was sacked, repeatedly.

Over and over and over, the central lesson of the destruction of Atlantis is forgotten.  Mankind were not meant to enslave other humans.  No one who is fit to rule over others would ever seek to rule over others.  Systems of hierarchy and oppression, systems of enslavement, are wrong.  People are better off being left alone to trade with one another in peace and freedom.

Unless the peoples of Earth learn these lessons, the cycle will persist.  Souls will come here to this plane of existence and learn and teach and grow and develop spiritually and die and return and learn again.  The only way to break from this cycle is to stop yearning for domination over others.  Stop wanting what others have, and grow what you have into abundance so you may trade freely with those willing to trade with you.  War must end, or it will end mankind.

We have opportunities for the next few months and years to build an actual civilisation which involves peace, freedom, and justice.   The zero aggression principle is a centrepiece of that civilisation, and exemplifies the concept of civility.  So does the golden rule.  We are capable of great beauty, great architecture, great style, great music, amazing things.  But we do have to resist the baser instinct to force others to submit to our will.

 

Jim Davidson is an author and entrepreneur.  Find him at HoustonSpaceSociety.net