Digs have turned up skeletons beneath the floor of one building, of all places, suggesting they may have used it for some rather devout religious purposes, but right now, we don’t really know. All we have to go on is the physical evidence itself, without literary references. A large part of the mystery of their disappearance is simply them being lost to time.
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Researchers are continuing to unearth new facts about this group every day, so perhaps we will soon know exactly what happened to them, but as of now, we just have the empty shells of the marvelous buildings and unique homes sitting seemingly abandoned. They lived extensively on grain and other crops for sustenance. This particular group was extremely artistic with their religion, painting massive murals and erecting large shrines of dedication that astonish art buffs today. They lived in modern-day Turkey from 7500 to 5700 BC in mud-brick housing not unlike that of other extremely early civilizations. The inhabitants of Catalhoyuk were a very old Neolithic civilization who also disappeared into thin air, as far as we can tell. Others have speculated that they relied heavily on hunting the mammoth, which became extinct, or even that the southwestern part of the United States was hit by a comet that wiped them out. That notion is supported by the fact that genetic links to the Clovis have even been found in the remains of ancient South American people. It has been hypothesized that their massive size forced them, much like Rome, to branch out into smaller groups which eventually evolved into distinct peoples in different places, making them the forerunners to many other Native American cultures. Nevertheless, they eventually just totally disappeared. These same tools and designs have been found across a good chunk of North America, meaning this group was particularly widespread. But this area, as well as an expansive land within the Americas, was the territory of one of the earliest American civilizations, the Clovis people, who are named after the modern-day city of Clovis, New Mexico.Ī rare and important archaeological discovery was made here, namely many sharp objects and weapons, obsidian, bone tools, and hammers, which were highly sophisticated for their time, 9050 to 8800 BC based on 21st-century estimates. Photo credit: Billwhittaker at English WikipediaĪnyone who’s ever been to the deserts of New Mexico might wonder how or why any civilization would live there before the advent of air conditioning. We really don’t hear about the Nabateans much after that era. Toward the end of their history, they were strong allies with the mighty Roman Empire, though Emperor Trajan did annex the kingdom from AD 105 to 106. They left us massive structures which aligned with celestial bodies as other ancient cultures did, proof of an engineering genius among these people. They established vast trade routes and commerce and became an extremely technologically advanced civilization for the day, with vast water systems which helped them survive the arid climate of Arabia.
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Nabatean writing would eventually develop over the centuries to become modern-day Arabic, and it wasn’t until recently that we were able to retrace its evolution.
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This ancient and seemingly forgotten kingdom spanned the territories of Syria, Arabia, and Palestine at one point, becoming rather massive. Semites are people who belong to a particular ancient language group, which includes Arabs, Akaadians, Hebrews, and more, and one of those groups was the Nabatean culture, which existed since at least 312 BC, as they are mentioned as having been attacked by the Macedonians. Here are ten civilizations that just up and vanished mysteriously. Interestingly, some of the cultures on this list were several hundred thousand people strong before they seemingly disappeared without a trace. Even these chilling instances, however, are small-time compared to the vanishing of an entire society.Įntire civilizations, cities, and empires have faded away, and today’s archaeologists and researchers often try to retrace their inhabitants’ steps and reconstruct what exactly happened to see if we can find a cause, and more importantly, a way to prevent it from happening to our cultures today.
#10 civilizations lost to time full
Sometimes, an airplane full of passengers flies off into the night, never to be seen again, or a ghost ship turns up floating around in the water with absolutely no sign of its crew. Mass disappearances are a very real and bizarre thing in which large numbers of people suddenly disappear without a trace, for seemingly no reason.