Wall of text incoming PART II:

You can read about Songlines here and Aboriginal astronomy here. Another example for Norse myth lovers is the giant Aurvandil who some think is actually a tale about a star. Guesses about the identity of this star have included the polestar (which has shifted multiple times over time), the planet Venus, Sirius, and the star Rigel in Orion. Some scholars think the Bifrost bridge is actually a poetic metaphor about the Milky Way, but it's far from widely accepted. The fire giant Surtr, the one who will bring about Ragnarok, has been interpreted by some to be a volcano - a giant that spews fire and wreaks destruction across the land. I personally think all myths have these same hidden aspects and are part of an ancient system developed by humans thousands and thousands of years ago that we've been misinterpreting. When you start to reinterpret these tales from this new perspective they are incredibly beautiful and an astonishingly brilliant way to pass on a system of complex knowledge to aid your people in survival through an incredibly chaotic world.

And since the article is about historical artifacts in the near east I highly suggest everyone here check out Mesopotamian religion and the relationship between the deities and Babylonian astronomy to understand exactly what the stories about these ancient gods and religions were really about. Some other suggested reading: the MUL.APIN, Babylonian Star Catalogues, Enuma anu enlil, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, Babylonian astrology, Babylonian Calendar, Babylonian constellations, and a proposed reconstruction of Babylonian star map.

If you are interested in reading about ancient religions you can find translations of many ancient texts for free all over the web, on many university archaeology and history department websites, or concentrated and organized in places like Sacred Texts. Many Museums have photographs of ancient tablets, scrolls, etc. available on their websites too if you want to get a peek at these objects for yourselves. If you want to start learning about ancient languages you can start here.

The fact that there are so many people around the world hellbent on destroying our ancient human culture and knowledge of history should only make those of us with access to this information more defiant than ever. They have no right to keep this knowledge from any of us. Archaeological findings and human history belong to all of us no matter our background because our modern civilization is a tapestry that has been weaved together of countless ancient civilizations. We have the luxury of having access to a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, something that has been incredibly rare in history since censorship and suppression of knowledge has been depressingly common, and so we should really take advantage of it while we can. Most of us take this amazing gift for granted, but we're more lucky to have access to this kind of knowledge than most people realize. People in the past, and clearly in modern times, risk their lives so that we may learn of our origins and we're all better off thanks to their sacrifices.

I genuinely worry that one day a totalitarian regime will consolidate power and work to destroy knowledge of the past in an attempt to keep our future descendants in the dark about their true history or use revisionist history as a political tool. I really think everyone lucky enough to have the internet, public libraries, access to a decent education, access to museums, etc. has a duty to commit as much of this knowledge to memory as possible, protect it, and work to share and disseminate it. People once traveled across the world with armed guards just to get a copy of scrolls or copy tablets onto a scroll - we only have to type in a search word to pull up thousands of years’ worth of knowledge and not risk our lives to do it.

We should all be working to find ways to preserve this knowledge digitally including creating private copies of ancient records, translations, and photographs of artifacts. We should strive to keep them safe in museums and libraries that are available to the global public and not hidden away in private collections. And, this may seem irrational, but maybe we should even keep secret caches of printed and digital copies buried around forests, stashed in caves, and so on in order to keep our history safe for all in the event some tyrannical regime rises and tries to destroy it and wipe our collective cultural memory or even in the event of civilization-shattering cataclysm. We've already lost so much knowledge of our origins and I hope we continue to work to prevent it from happening again.