What are some ancient (pre-Christian) or modern mythologies that have been lost as a result of natural consequences?
Civilizations are big, and people are resilient - so we rarely find things like, “This plague/volcanic eruption/extinction of a species 100% wiped out this civilization and their culture”. People tended to move away rather than just die, and their cultures tended to assimilate and combine rather than just vanish.
But there are placed where we reasonably believe that natural consequences resulted in the decline of civilizations:
-
The decline of the Sumerian nations is associated with increasing salinity of the fields in southern Sumeria, shifting populations north towards Akkad. I believe there’s still uncertainty over whether this was driven by Sumerian irrigation practices or some other cause, but the fact that it happened is undeniable.
-
The Hittite Empire was a vast prehistoric empire which collapsed as part of a period of upheaval known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. The cause of the collapse is still disputed, but it is clear that there was some environmental shift involved. Warfare, plague, and economic changes may also have contributed.
In both these cases, we have only very fragmentary remnants of the surviving culture, often filtered through the lens of subsequent civilizations’ recordings. The Hittites even were arguably “lost” for a time - until the mid-1800s, they were only known through Biblical references, rather than any relics or ruins.
-
We don’t know. We lost them as a result of natural consequences.
Have you heard about the person leaving the village in which everyone dies? Me neither.
Is this a trick question? I mean the answer is in “pre-christian " and “natural consequence”. The " conquista” answer to both for example.
Having the Spanish show up with armor, horses, and some weird book naturally has a detrimental effect on your mythology.
But, most of the (at the time of the conquista) conteporary prehispanic mythologies (late post classic period) were not completely lost, we know quite a bit about them, actually. even some spaniards attempted to preserve and study that knowledge (church folk). A lot of it , predominarily mexica lore and traditions got incorporated into catholicism in a process known as syncretism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism
We did lose tonnes of artifacts (gold and silver stuff), art, and architecture, though.
So I’m gonna specifically suggest the Teotihuacan civilization that existed during the mesoamerican classical period. They predated the mexica people (aztecs) but their temples and other vestiges of their culture were found by the aztecs and incorporated into their own mythology.
Still to this day, we don’t know much about them.
Exactly, the Inquisition is another example. And, if we translate “pre Christian” into an era say around 1000 CE, then the same can be said of the Ottoman Empire, or any other empire in history. Traditionally, smaller communities tended to have an oral tradition, so nobody can know what’s lost.
