“Before Him all the nations are as nothing; they are regarded by Him as worthless and less than nothing. To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare Him to?”
– Isaiah 40:17–18
Civilizations come and go, as do governments and nations.
God our Creator loves people and determines and blesses each nation with a span of time so it might prosper and flourish. This blessing ends when a nation becomes degenerate, rebellious, and sinful. Ultimately God determines that extended mercy for a nation has no redeeming value or effect. He will thenmarginalizes and/or destroy that nation.
The earth is covered with nations and the bones of people who have fallen. There remain many we have no idea about and we occasionally come across their remains. These fallen civilizations should be a reminder that WE also are a sinful rebellious people and that America is under God's judgement.
Yet the fate of these great cultures fasinates us! So lets take a look at a few.
Prehistory means the time “before we had written records” (roughly before the 4th Century BC) and what we call ancient history is the time since our recorded history.
Our concept of ancient history has been aided by the bible. But the bible is not a history book of mankind since time began but a book about God, ourselves, and about how to live, now and eternally. The Bible helps us know God, love God, and follow God and understand humankind. The Bible also contains God’s master plan of salvation.
There remains much about humanity and all the civilizations that have come and gone in old extra-biblical texts/codices etc. or is lost to history. This includes the civilizations that flourished prior to the flood that we are just becoming aware of today. Those called mega-lithic are often the remnants of those civilizations.
The existence and discovery of unexplainable monuments, buildings, and archaeological finds pertaining to ancient/prehistory, are causing more and more archaeologists to consider that long forgotten advanced civilizations existed.
NASA states they believe that at least 30 advanced civilizations have collapsed before us (article: NASA Claims: Over 30 advanced civilizations have collapsed before us – Are we next?) That number is certainly more with many that lie in the oceans depths never to be found.
Mysterious Lost Civilizations
Here are two examples, there are perhaps hundreds if not thousands:
The Indian civilizations that lasted thousands of years and then vanished include those remnants found in the Indus Valley, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro fo example. The cities were very sophisticated, well-planned, that archaeologists believe they were planned in advance before construction began.
The Harappa culture also remains an enigma, its origins and decline unknown and its dialect/writing is completely indecipherable.
The Longyou Caves
"Few historical records or dateable evidence has been found to answer any of these questions, with only a Chinese poem by Yu Xun, written in the 17th century giving some documented provenance.
Archaeologists have recovered glazed clay pots in the silt soils of the cavern floor, dated to the Western Han Dynasty from 206 BC to AD 23, which suggests the caves were constructed earlier and date from around 2,000 years ago.." frm the article: THE MYSTERY OF THE LONGYOU CAVES
How an advanced civilisation vanished 2,500 years ago – BBC News
Video from BBC News
"The Tartessos were an advanced Bronze Age society that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in southern Spain around 3,000 years ago. But 500 years later, the civilisation vanished mysteriously. Now new research is investigating how and why the Tartessos disappeared." from video introduction
The Ancient People Who Burned Their Culture to the Ground
"At a site in Spain, archaeologists piece together the last days of Tartessos, an advanced society that vanished 2,500 years ago.
SMOKE BILLOWS SKYWARD, PARTIALLY OBSCURING a monumental, two-story hall. The smell of roasting meat is thick in the night air, still oppressively hot though the sun has set on this arid valley in what is now southwestern Spain.
Inside the hall, hundreds of people gather around a long wooden table set with fine ceramics and bronze challices. They feast, and drink rivers of wine as the night deepens. A few feet outside the banquet hall, down a massive staircase, a fine-boned horse is led into an open courtyard. Perhaps observed by those who had been feasting, the animal’s throat is opened with a single slash. It is the first of dozens of sacrifices: other horses, cows, donkeys, pigs, a dog—and possibly humans—all brought to this place, ritually killed, and left as offerings to the gods. When the sacrifices end, the people remaining take up torches and set fire to the site, burning the bright red-painted plaster off its adobe pillars and charring the bodies of the sacrificed. As the last embers die out, they use shovels to bury the courtyard, the hall, everything. The work takes days, and will leave the site beneath a layer of dirt and clay nearly 14 feet thick in places. And then the people, the last known members of the Tartessos civilization, disappear from the world.
Some of the details of the grand finale feast and mass sacrifice that occurred about 2,500 years ago can only be sketched. But the dramatic end to Tartessos seems fitting for a civilization that often loomed larger than life in ancient history. Anchored by a port city bearing its name, and with a cultural reach that spanned roughly the southwestern third of the Iberian Peninsula, Tartessos emerged in the ninth century B.C. For about 400 years, Tartessos was, to the ancient Greeks and other contemporaries who wrote about it, a near-mythic culture rich in resources and technologies, including shipbuilding and metallurgy. Then it disappeared. Today, researchers consider Tartessos to be the Western Mediterranean’s first historical civilization. Now, at an excavation in Extremadura—a region of Spain that borders Portugal, just north of Seville—a new understanding of how that civilization may have ended is emerging from the orange and yellow soil. But the site, Casas del Turuñuelo, is also uncovering new questions.." from the article: The Ancient People Who Burned Their Culture to the Ground
Here is an article from 2019 that gives us a understanding of what archeology today knows or can extrapolate about ancinet civilizations and megalithic structures.
Researchers Trace the Origins of Thousands of Ancient European Megaliths
(Inside Science) – New research suggests that megaliths — monuments such as Stonehenge created from large rocks during the Stone and Copper Ages in Europe — owe their origins to a mysterious culture from northwest France with advanced seafaring technology.
Roughly 35,000 megaliths are known throughout Europe, including standing stones, stone circles and megalithic tombs. Most megaliths date from 4500 to 2500 B.C., are concentrated in coastal areas along the Atlantic and Mediterranean and share similar or even identical architectural features, said archaeologist Bettina Schulz Paulsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The origins of megaliths have proven controversial for more than a century. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeologists believed the practice may have originated at a single point in the Near East, and then spread westward through migrant priests or prospectors. Later, the rise of radiocarbon dating led to the currently dominant argument that the concept of megaliths arose independently multiple times across Europe.
Schulz Paulsson’s new study reviewed data from 11 different languages that analyzed 2,410 radiocarbon dates for megalithic sites and related areas throughout Europe to better understand the way megaliths spread across the continent.
She found that the earliest predecessors of megalithic sites were only seen in northwest France, with one example in the Paris Basin dating between 5061 and 4858 B.C. The most ancient megalithic graves — structures of stone slabs built above-ground and covered by a round or long mound of earth or stone — later emerged during a 200- to 300-year span in the early 4000s B.C. in northwest France, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Thousands of megaliths were then built in France, the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula during the late 3000s B.C. and in Scandinavia during the early 3000s B.C.
Although Stonehenge is located about 60 kilometers (about 37 miles) away from the coast, Schulz Paulsson noted it was built near the end of the megalithic age, when the concept had time to spread from the coasts. Moreover, these societies could readily overcome large distances — Schulz Paulsson said that Stonehenge’s components were quarried more than 250 kilometers away.
This sequence of events and the placement of the sites suggests the concept of megaliths spread over sea routes originating from northwest France in three main phases over the course of a millennium, Schulz Paulsson said.
She added that maritime technology and seafaring during the megalithic age were probably more advanced than previously thought.
Future research will examine DNA and strontium isotopes from human bones from these sites to learn more about who built these megaliths, Schulz Paulsson said. She detailed her findings online Feb. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." from the article: Researchers Trace the Origins of Thousands of Ancient European Megaliths