Chapter 41 Chapter 38 Restoring a World - Part 1: The Lost Civilization

This is a god man. He used to be an ordinary civil servant and then resigned. The reasons for resignation are rather special.Generally speaking, most people resigning means changing to a new job, no matter what the nature is.Going to sea after resigning is considered a business.If you resign and go to another unit or company, it is considered job hopping.If you quit your job and play all day long, you must have made a fortune. This god-man doesn't stick to any of the above. He resigned to do what he likes, so he just resigned.Very dumbfounded. Of course, he had no income after resigning. After a few years, he found that his savings were dwindling, so he figured out a way for himself.

I don't know how a person can start a business when he has no funds, no way out, and no loans. After thinking about it, he can only run against the law and discipline.But if he does that, he's not a god-man, he's a criminal. Obviously, he didn't go the criminal way.Not only did he abide by the law, but he lived well when he had no funds, no way out, and no loans.So what does he do for a living?He published pamphlets himself, and made a living from it.Certainly not the kind of distribution that was published illegally. It took him almost a year at first, right?Established its own stable customer base.

Every year, his clients will receive no less than 5 booklets, each with no less than 50,000 words in actual content.All the content is about prehistoric civilizations, the content is not just excerpts or synthesis, but also analysis and some hints.As a reward, his customers need to pay him 800 yuan (RMB) a year for subscription.I have read some of those brochures and they are very interesting. In 3 years, he has more than 240 subscription customers, and it is still expanding. I calculated that he earns more than 10,000 yuan a month, and he doesn't have to pay taxes. So I say: He is a man of God.

But things were far from that simple. Finally, one day, this god-man broke out, speaking a language that no one could understand, and writing pictures or words that no one could understand.Finally, he was judged as a mental patient. But when I saw him, he was much better after a period of treatment. He looks different than I imagined.At first I thought he would be the kind of person who looks a bit evil, or has a bit of wild and unruly temperament, but I guessed wrong.He looks like an ordinary middle-aged man, slightly fat, with a serious expression, he is used to frowning and thinking about things, and his speech speed is not fast.The overall look is very gentle, very ordinary, the kind that can't be found immediately in the crowd.Anyway, you wouldn't associate him with a different kind, it doesn't look like anywhere.

Me: "Hello." He looked at me calmly: "You are fine too." Me: "Is it better recently?" He smiled: "Hehe, it's much better." Me: "Well, that's good. Regarding my identity, you also know and agree. So shall we start now?" He looked at me with a smile: "Hasn't it already started?" Me: "Okay, let's start with why you study prehistoric civilization." He: "There is no special reason, it's just that I am very interested in these things, it's a hobby. Don't you too? Get some patient information from the doctor, and then find some interviews and record them, it's just a hobby. And, you Have you found out, hobbies are a good teacher and will guide you automatically. I like these, so I do some research on this myself."

Me: "But you neither studied these things nor engaged in this field of work." He: "Well, that's it. But, I want to say, you can't study history by yourself if you haven't studied it before? You can't love archeology if you're not a major? You can't write poems and publish books without going to university? These are not necessarily related, are they? ?” Me: "Well, yes, that's right." He: "Speaking of which, I was initially interested because when I was reading a newspaper about 10 years ago, an article attracted me. It was reported that a certain prehistoric relic had been discovered. I thought it was very interesting, so I started to think about it myself. Of course, that meeting was just pondering, without collecting information or planning to discuss it in depth. However, one night, I suddenly thought of something."

Me: "What?" He: "Let's put it this way, if you are an astronaut and arrive on another planet, and you find a ruin or a ruin, then, what should you use to understand and initially judge what kind of civilization this was?" Me: "Uh... I don't know, I haven't thought about it... What is the initial judgment?" He smiled proudly: "Through the remaining carved characters and patterns of the ruins. This is the most intuitive, isn't it?" Me: "So that's the case... But what if the buildings in those ruins don't have inscriptions or patterns?"

He: "Of course, maybe not all buildings will be engraved with words and patterns, but there will definitely be, no matter how few. And a simple analysis, you can know that this is indeed feasible, let's talk about human beings .Most buildings inhabited by human beings are not engraved with words and patterns. It is only done on those monumental or iconic buildings. For example, monuments, steles, and so on. And this type of buildings, the purpose It is to commemorate something, so it will be much stronger than ordinary residential buildings. If relics of previous civilizations are found on alien planets, then there must be carved characters and patterns, because the remaining buildings are probably not ordinary It is a commemorative house, but a commemorative sign. Let’s take a practical example: let’s talk about the Mayan culture. That is, these commemorative landmark buildings are the only ones left, so that the original Mayan culture researchers have always mistakenly believed that the core of the Mayan civilization paid attention to time. The Mayans paid great attention to time, but not to that extent. It’s just that those monuments survived, making us mistakenly think that they paid attention to time. If the United States is now in decline and perishing, most buildings have collapsed and weathered, leading to disappearance. The World War II monuments are left. Then researchers of later generations may mistakenly believe that the core of American culture is to focus on war."

I found this guy to be very logical. Me: "It makes sense and is interesting." He: "In this way, through those carvings, you will most directly see what kind of creatures, what kind of appearance, and what kind of activities existed in this former civilization. Very intuitive, right? By studying the text, you will Get more content." Me: "The pattern part is fine, but studying the text of an unfamiliar civilization...isn't it easy?" He: "It's not easy, but it's not impossible. This is also the point I want to say." Me: "OK, tell me."

He: "Let's use Maya as an example. You must have heard of Mayan civilization." I nod. He: "The Maya civilization in South America was destroyed by the Spanish colonists in the 16th century. Not only that, the Spanish priests also believed that the strange pictures in the Maya language were the language of barbaric and uncivilized devils, and put almost all The Mayan bark books were all burned. This is not the end. In order to achieve the purpose of ruling, the Mayan text scribes were forced to learn Spanish. Anyone who used the Mayan text would be tortured or burned to death (also I don’t know who is barbaric). Can you understand what it means to not have your own writing? This means that the Mayan culture and civilization will be forgotten and will be erased from that era.”

Me: "You mean, the Mayan culture didn't die out naturally? Was it wiped out artificially?" He: "Yes, man-made. It was artificially obliterated by those Spanish colonists in the name of spreading the gospel in the 16th century." Me: "I really don't know about this part. I always thought that the Mayan civilization was a prehistoric civilization. And some materials I read before said that the Mayan culture itself was already in decline. The Spanish and South American colonial wars at that time only served as a catalyst. It works, isn't it like that?" He: "The Mayan civilization was inherited from a certain prehistoric civilization. In this process, a lot of materials have been lost, but they were not destroyed naturally. Think about it, who recorded those materials? What you see is European Documents and materials, right? How credible do you think the logic of robbers who occupy other countries and then claim that the other party is too corrupt to fight to perish? Or, have you been deceived?" Me: "Uh... makes sense." He: "Let's not talk about those issues, let's talk about it. People who know Mayan script have basically disappeared since then. The descendants of the Maya have lost their own history, and the origin of culture has been cut off. By the 18th century, those Mayan buildings hidden in the South American rainforest were rediscovered, and the Mayan inscriptions, Mayan carvings, and murals carved on those buildings were rediscovered." Me: "I know what you want to say later: but after 200 years, no one can understand." He: "Yes, that's how it is. However, it can still be untied after all." Me: "Sorry, you have to explain this part, I still don't understand how to understand those strange things, I have no clue at all." He: "No clue? That's not what you said. There is still a clue." I couldn't help but check to see if the recorder was working because I was so curious about this part! He: "Mayan script is hieroglyphic, don't you deny it?" I'm right." He: "I have studied semiotics by myself and learned a lot of interesting things. Let's talk about characters. If the basic symbols of a civilized language are less than 40, then the language behind the language must be a pinyin language. The representative one is the Latin language family; if a civilized text has about 100 basic symbols, then this kind of text is a syllabic language, and the typical one is Sanskrit; then, a civilization’s text has as many as thousands or even tens of thousands of basic symbols. It must belong to the ideographic writing system, which is the basis of pictographs, and the representative ones are Chinese characters. Although Maya has less than 1,000 known basic symbols, it is neither alphabetic nor completely ideographic. But it can be seen It can be seen that it has the characteristics of ideographic characters, that is, the characteristics of pictographs. So what is the most representative character of pictographs?" He covered up what I said, which made me react for a while: "Ah...that..." He: "I guess you haven't remembered that the most representative pictographs are numbers. Think about Chinese: One horizontal line represents 1, and two horizontal lines represent 2, right?" I was relieved: "Oh, yes, that's right." He: "It's easy to do if you know this. Let's start with the Mayan text and the numbers. After observing the inscriptions on the inscriptions, we found clues. One dot represents 1, two dots represent 2, and so on, but we didn't find 5 dot, then there must be a new symbol representing the number 5. The simplest and most representative one is that five dots arranged horizontally are merged to form a horizontal bar. In Maya, a horizontal bar means stands for 5." Me: "A horizontal bar and a dot represent the number 6?" He: "That's right, that's it." Me: "Interesting, really interesting! I see!" He: "Actually, this is part of the content of semiotics. It is not boring. Maybe it is the last word 'learning' that makes many people daunted? Let's continue. After knowing the number, you can study the one before or after the number. Text. In most cases, it usually represents the date. Of course, it is not denied that there are carvings representing other numbers, but don’t forget that in monumental buildings, it is impossible to record this as 100 monkeys throughout. 100 people, right? There must be a date, right? The date when the hieroglyph was deciphered is the beginning. Take your time, and you will always decipher more basic symbols, so..." Me: "You are amazing, is it you who deciphered the Mayan script?" Although most of the time I kept my emotions in check and rarely got agitated, I couldn't help but get agitated. He laughed: "Of course I didn't crack it. Someone has already cracked it a lot. I just told you how to crack the Maya text and analyzed it for you myself." Me: "...so that's the case...but then again, your analysis is very good." He: "These contents have already been written in the journals I originally sent out." Me: "I didn't read all of those brochures, but only part of them." He: "Actually, it's nothing, it doesn't matter; let's put these aside, the Mayan civilization is completely different from ours." Me: "Okay, you continue." He: "From the text, civilization can basically infer the core culture of this society." Me: "Ah... you mean the content of the text?" Him: "No, text structure." Me: "Text structure? What do you mean?" He: "Most of the cultures of pinyin and scale writing focus on nature or humanities. Therefore, their character composition is very simple and linear. For example, the word you is arranged from left to right, and there is no such thing as up and down in the arrangement. Say. That’s one-dimensional, isn’t it?” Me: "That's right." He: "The use of ideographic characters is a language family characterized by pictographs. The cultural core focuses on nature and historical inheritance. As I said just now, the representative is Chinese. The text structure is no longer linear, but It is two-dimensional. For example, my surname is Guo. There are up and down, and left and right." I thought about it carefully: "That's right, two-dimensional structured text." He: "What about Mayan text? It's more complicated. Mayan text has a three-dimensional structure. It not only has up, down, left, right, but also distance. That is to say, there are overlapping characteristics in the basic text symbols. And the order of reading is 'up first. Then down, first left and then right, first near and then far'. Although the Mayan text is a pictograph, each square that looks like a small picture to us is actually a short sentence." Me: "Hey? It's really interesting, so what is the core of the characteristics of Mayan culture?" He: "Art, the core of Mayan culture is art. Their words have been integrated with pictures, and some words are even enlarged and used as illustrations. Isn't that unheard of?" Me: "Indeed, it's really interesting. But the Mayans must have been very tired when they learned to write." He: "No, you just learned Chinese characters naturally when you were young, but white people think Chinese characters are scary and too difficult. Being in that culture, you don't think there is any special difficulty. Maya also It’s the same, it’s not as difficult as I imagined. I started from understanding those words, and I was completely fascinated by it, because I knew very well that understanding those words was only the beginning. Later, while collecting data and analyzing and comparing, I found a lot of problems. It is a truly lost civilization, and there are still many unknowns and unanswered questions. At the same time, there are still many, many doubts. I understood at that time that what I know is only a door. I hope to use my own efforts to find Back to that lost civilization." I find it very interesting that a non-professional researches these things just out of interest—it is a relatively unpopular content, and knowing so much, finally has his own set of ideas and understandings, which is very remarkable.Few people are willing to do research on this, but it makes countless people feel mysterious and full of yearning.why?I don't want to use exaggerated world style to justify, I just want to say: too many people care about utilitarianism, and they are unwilling to calm down and do something truly meaningful that does not involve profit. However, the mentally ill can, which cannot but be said to be ironic.