History would be worthless unless we were to learn lessons from it. And no correct lesson can be learned from a narrative that is concocted, and not close to facts. In that case, the corruption of truth becomes counter-productive. Today, it is a major misconception for modern man to feel that the present state of material development represents the pinnacle of human progress. This is an illusion, as nothing is gained without consequential costs. Regrettably, high rates of material development, also lead to environmental degradation. Since the nineteenth century, the ecological costs have been extremely high, and have brought our planet, the only home of humankind, close to disaster. Two major wars have also ravaged nations during the last century. We have not learned the correct lessons from history, Recent archaeological finds, over the last half-century, have indicated that there was indeed global intercourse and trade, at fairly high levels of human development even ten millennia ago, without the annihilating conflagrations of today. It may, thus, be worth our while to examine whether some valuable lessons could not be learned from the history of ancient times, some aspects of which we have often chosen to ignore or misinterpret.
Since the industrial revolution in Europe led to the political ascendancy of Western powers, it has been an objective of the ruling classes of these states, to also show that human civilization had reached its highest levels of sophistication through this revolution, and the resulting material developments promoted by them. Earlier, assiduous efforts were made till the 19th century of the current era, to establish that the biblical theory of the creation of man by God, represented the truth about man's advent on this planet. However, when Darwin overturned this theory, it became necessary to show that cultural human development had moved longitudinally from Africa to Egypt, and thence to Babylon, Greece, and Rome, where, in southern Europe, cultures were uniquely evolved, leading to, supposedly, the highest levels of sophistication of human civilization, as it exists in the western nations of today.
Over the past two centuries, western universities have made strenuous efforts to promote the aforementioned ideology and shut out any other light that new archaeological discoveries of the last half-century, could shed. Indeed even some of the older evidence about cultural development, such as those concerning the growth of Indo-European languages, with their roots in Sanskrit, were systematically challenged and their significance covered with controversies. The role of migrations from the cast by very diverse groups over some seven to eight thousand years was lumped together as Celtic migrations, and their importance was minimized, with the migrants being dubbed as barbarians. New archaeological discoveries of the Neolithic period in Anatolia and in Eastern Europe, which could be quite revolutionary for historical interpretations of that period, have also been shut out from the history currently being taught in most Western universities.
