[WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

Thu Oct 30 22:46:39 UTC 2003

Stan Shebs wrote:

> More than a little of the ancient history that we know has been 
> painstakingly
> reconstructed from reports of sensational but ephemeral events; those 
> reports
> often give us bits of cultural insight that the ancient scholars didn't
> understand well enough to describe in their encyclopedias and histories.

A lot of archaeological excavations take place in ancient garbage dumps. 
 We don't study what these societies treasured, but what they threw 
away. :-)

Ec