Project Vision 21

A recent report, by Egyptologist Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and published in Smithsonian Magazine, confirms that the Hittites (in today’s Turkey) gave rise to the Iron Age 3,300 years ago by inventing the procedure necessary to separate that metal from other minerals.

Despite the revolutionary and beneficial nature of this advance and the new knowledge obtained (for example, knowing how to create and control temperatures above 2300ºF), this practice took about 700 years to expand to other regions until it finally reached Egypt and other ancient cultures.

This information, provided by Almansa-Villatoro, led me to ask two questions: what knowledge developed 700 years ago (that is, in the 13th and 14th centuries of our era) is only now beginning to be known in our society? And at the same time, what current knowledge will only be known and shared in 700 years, in the 28th century?

But as I continued reading the article, I came across another example of knowledge lost in time not for centuries, but for millennia.

It turns out that recent research in the pyramid of Pharaoh Unas (or Unis), who reigned from approximately 2465 to 2325 BC, led to an astonishing discovery: the Egyptians knew about 4400 years ago that meteorites fell from the sky or, to put it another way, that meteorites were (are) literally extraterrestrial objects.

And the Egyptians reached that correct conclusion 4,200 years before European and American scientists accepted at the beginning of the 19th century (specifically, 1833) that meteorites reach the earth and not, as was long believed, jump from somewhere in the earth. the earth and then fall into another.

How do we know that the Egyptians were thousands of years ahead of modern scientists? Because they say it explicitly in an inscription on the ceiling of the Unas pyramid in Saqqarah, the first pyramid with texts inside. The inscription reads: “[The king] Unis seizes the sky and splits its iron.”

As Almansa-Villatoro explains, “this knowledge died with the ancient world, along with the associated myths, languages, writing systems and rituals.”
 

In that context, one may wonder whether it might not be the case that there is some other ancient knowledge, trivial or profound, written somewhere, which we have not yet discovered or understood, and which perhaps will be of benefit to us.

And at the same time, what knowledge and wisdom are we developing at this moment so that, if it were rediscovered in more than 4,000 years, it would be celebrated for having been cutting-edge wisdom?

Be that as it may, this whole situation of lost and recovered knowledge generates all kinds of possibilities. For example, the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman works of art and manuscripts about half a millennium ago gave rise to the Renaissance, the consequences of which we are still experiencing.

If our current wisdom were lost and rediscovered 1,500 years later, would it spark a renaissance of civilization? I doubt it. I don't believe we are building anything at that high level of eternity.