Prior to the twentieth century, a majority of christian europeans assumed the bible to be literal in its setting forth the age of creation, which certain clerics calculated to be about 6000 years. They believed a lot of other odd things, too. By the 1970's Marschak, an anthropologist, threw established notions of prehistory all cock-a-hoop with the disclosure that orderly markings on an antler found near a paleolithic fire pit in Czechoslovakia were in fact lunar phase diagrams. And they were dated to 25,000 bc.
How old is knowledge? We still can't agree.
Lately I have come across two widely separated books with a common theme...the "hidden" science of the Rgveda. The Rgveda is the Indian scripture with a wealth of mysterious intellectual structures scattered about, a kind of reader's Stonehenge and Baalbeck rolled into a lengthy series of poems and stories. One book purports to establish a common hidden ancestry for all cultural musical norms, and another purports to discover hidden astronomical knowledge of an extremely high order hidden in the numerical structure of the poems stanzas.
Someday before I die I hope to read both books, and feel quite brainy as I do. In the meantime, I wonder if we are not in fact living at the end of the age of Knowledge, however long it has taken to get to this point. With men like President Bush governing the amassed destructive resources of our civilization based on feelings that originate from a point no higher than his belly button, I would guess that questions of the age of knowledge will become academic, even as the academies close and fall to ruin.
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