50 Memes That Shed Light On Our Past And Are Hilarious At The Same Time

Bored Panda got in touch with archaeologist and historian Ari Akkermans to cover parts of history that often go overlooked. After all, the record is mostly made by things that were actually “left behind,” which ignores all the objects and items that were lost to time. So we asked him to give some examples of objects, artifacts, etc that were common in the past but are just not around anymore.

“First, the Kilia idol. Super common in the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, only 15 have been found complete, and thousands of small fragments, I'm one of the few experts in the topic and one of the idols held in Istanbul, bought from an auction, was a central character in my film After Utopia: The Birds, a collaboration with Feleksan Onar at an archaeological museum in Turkey,” he shared.

Other examples were quite a bit larger. “The Temple of Apollo in Antioch, nothing remains of it,” he shared. “Not because of the 50 earthquakes that rocked the city, most likely destroyed by Christians after it survived many generations.” An important temple in an important, large city, lost to time.

If that sounds bad, you might be surprised to learn that some even important things are also just lost or destroyed. For example, one other lost item is “The tomb of Alexander the Great, although there are many ongoing excavations right now in Egypt to find it, of course under a nationalist viewpoint.”

“The original manuscripts of the poetry of Sappho, and most Archaic poetry, including plays by Aescylus, Euripides,etc, a whole lot of literature! Which were lost with the Library of Alexandria among other catastrophes in the ancient world,” he shared with Bored Panda.

This wasn’t even the only bit of language we can no longer access. “Tablets in the languages that preceded Greek, namely Minoan, in the Bronze Age. There's only a couple of inscriptions and the famous Linear A and B, though it might have been written as extensively as Babylonian. The first language Linear A has not been deciphered, the second language, Linear B, has only one fully deciphered text.”

Similarly, “Old South Arabian inscriptions. Four entire languages, including Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic and Minean, and Hasaitic. including the ancestors of Arabic and Ethiopia's Ge'ez, all Semitic languages, have only 15,000 inscriptions left. For a comparison, the corpus of Ancient and Byzantine Greek is over 105 million words and some 20,000 inscriptions.”