How do such amazing things get forgotten ?

[Modelworks]

I was watching nat geo on netflix and the documentary of the Chinese terracotta warriors. Several thousand life size warriors made of clay, all detailed and painted and buried with the emperor. I love archeology and wanted to do it professionally at one time but the thing I can't understand is how things like this just get forgotten.

The above site was found by two farmers digging a well. I could understand if a flood wiped out the population overnight or a volcano like in Pompeii . other instances of things like cities found carved out of rock under the surface with hundreds of chambers and nobody knows it exist until someone falls through the roof of one room. Or a field in Europe that contains millions of dollars in gold and jewels discovered in a cow pasture by a guy with a metal detector.

It just amazes me how do things like this get forgotten ?

 

[Anubis]

this might be totally wrong but IIRC the emperor who is burried there had all the people who made it killed and those that did the killing killed so it was supposed to be a secret

 

[Schadenfroh]

It just amazes me how do things like this get forgotten ?

Very easy for ideas and things to get lost before mass communication.

Think of where we would be today if The Romans had developed the printing press and created equivalents of The Great Library of Alexandra in all of the major cities of the Western world.

 

[Modelworks]

this might be totally wrong but IIRC the emperor who is burried there had all the people who made it killed and those that did the killing killed so it was supposed to be a secret

Yes he did kill or they committed suicide but that was only 178 people out of the millions that lived in the empire. I just can't see how any reference to it, not even stories that it existed was forgotten. Other emperors before him also did something similar so it had to be known to be going on in the empire.

 

[coldmeat]

Reminds me of that Golden Buddha that was in a Cracked article a little while back.

 

[nageov3t]

step 1: do something amazing.
step 2: bury it.
step 3: wait 2,000 years.

 

[Alone]

Reminds me of that Golden Buddha that was in a Cracked article a little while back.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18533_the-6-most-important-things-humanity-just-plain-forgot.html

 

[Meghan54]

Let's see....everyone connected to it (building, etc.) is killed.

Everyone else who knows anything about it gets real quiet because the penalty is rather severe.

After 100 generations, I'd think it'd be forgotten about completely, too. It'd more likely become the stuff of fairy tales or legends.

And remember, the knowledge of it would be very localized to whatever villages were nearby, so the numbers of people who'd know about it would be very small.....and it's not like anyone could post a YouTube video of it or broadcast email or post on the internet for everyone to see. It's very likely entire provinces never even heard of it before it was discovered.

 

[SillyOReilly]

What I find amazing is no record, other than the Chinese, about the supernova that created the crab nebula.

 

[Schadenfroh]

What I find amazing is no record, other than the Chinese, about the supernova that created the crab nebula.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999PASP..111..871C

We find that the explosion of the supernova is likely to have occurred weeks to months before the commonly accepted date of 1054 July 4. This view is strongly supported by a number of European references to events visible in the evening sky during the spring that are likely to be associated with the appearance of the supernova. We find that the best fit to the light curve based on Chinese observations and a maximum visible apparent magnitude for a supernova located at the distance to the Crab Nebula also confirms the earlier explosion date.