I usually don’t like to participate in discussions about “ancient art history” because it’s already a bad book, but I can’t believe that some things are so stubborn that even the steel bars are exposed and still washing the floor.

The sculptures in the ancient Greek exhibition revealed steel bars, and they even washed the floor and said it was “cultural relic restoration”

Yes, yes, in fact, there are similar problems with “cultural relic restoration” all over the world, but the Western approach is just too outrageous. It’s not about “repairing old as old”, it’s about picking up a small stone and directly building a mountain for you, telling you, this is “Olympus Mountain”.

There are two methods for repairing:

One way is to obtain the textual archives and data records of that year, find all the cultural relics or traces of that year, and try to maintain their original state as much as possible on this basis, even if it is only fragments or ruins, it is still very valuable.

Another approach is to rely solely on myths and legends, picking up a few broken stones and finding a few contemporary art masters to brainstorm and create a “miracle” from the past, proclaiming it as the “light of civilization” and brainwashing the world with history books and textbooks.

The so-called “restoration” in the West is actually the process of combining old and new materials to create a new one. These “ancient Greek” statues feature a whitening, smoothing, moisturizing, and Renaissance style.

I try my best not to mention the issue of “fabrication”, although TM’s “realistic style” sculptures with Renaissance style and human anatomy added thousands of years ago are a bit unsettling… mainly because most of these things do not have excavation reports or geological information, so I casually take out a shiny and new thing, which is said to be “BC”.

Not only sculptures, but also architecture. The beams of the Parthenon Temple are all made of steel bars… Nowadays, the Parthenon Temple is built from ruins, and the parts that cannot be found are reinforced with concrete. So, it is completely unbelievable that ancient Greek temples claimed to be over 2000 years old. If you really go and see it, you will know that this is a “modern building” constructed with various new and old stone materials and reinforced concrete, which is a sewing monster created by modern people. What it looked like back then, only ghosts know.

The Ming city walls in many parts of China are only a few hundred years old and are already in ruins and riddled with holes. Why can Roman temples and arenas still maintain such a magnificent appearance? The Terra Cotta Warriors of the Qin Shihuang was only 2000 years ago. Once unearthed, the color faded and became gray. So how did Pompeii preserve its dazzling murals for 3000 years?

The Buddha statues salvaged from the sea in Southeast Asia have been corroded by time and covered with various underwater shellfish, but the statues salvaged by Western archaeologists from the seabed are as smooth as ever. Is it possible that the underwater environments of the East and the West are completely different?

There are stone tablets and carvings of the Ming and Qing dynasties everywhere in Nanjing city. There is a tomb of the Ming Dynasty general Deng Yu near my home, which is only a few hundred years ago. Many of the inscriptions on the tombstones in front of the tomb are already unclear, and many places have even been completely erased… What kind of black technology is the four thousand year old obelisk and the two thousand year old Rosetta stone tablet, which have clear handwriting?

As we all know, ancient buildings and artifacts can be restored. The Great Wall, ancient city walls, and many relics we see today have been restored, but restoration is restoration, and creation is creation. These are two different things

It’s not that I don’t believe it, but Westerners are truly experienced and have achieved brilliant results in this regard… In 2019, the Jerusalem Museum in Washington D.C. discovered that out of the 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in its collection, 5 were confirmed to be fake after re identification and will no longer be displayed in the museum in the future.

What kind of superhero is Aristotle really? He has written over 170 works in his lifetime, with astonishing achievements in almost all fields including politics, economics, law, philosophy, science, education, poetry, etc., totaling over ten million words. He is proficient in mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, technology, navigation, military, politics… He knows everything and is capable of anything, with magnificent works of millions of words covering everything. How many sheepskins did an ancient person who lived over 300 years ago in a society with backward productivity and a small population have to cut? How much ink should be used? How much manpower and material resources are needed to complete this great crystallization of human civilization?

During the Western Han Dynasty, Sima Qian only wrote 520000 words in his lifetime. Productivity determines the level of civilization, indicating that the peak of the Western Han Dynasty with a population of 63 million was far inferior to ancient Greece with a population of one million?

Some people say that the history of civilization is a shared memory, and modifying the shared memory is a huge project that requires the efforts of many generations and cannot be achieved… I also believe this statement. But when I found out that a Chinese high school dropout netizen had forged millions of words of “ancient Russian history” on his own, and remembered that writers could create a world out of thin air, and game creators could write game settings that were as detailed as their toes… it seemed that creating history was not that difficult anymore.

In fact, to verify whether an ancient civilization is advanced, it is not determined by one or two smooth and new sculptures, bronze ware, or brightly colored murals that resemble those of yesterday.

Whether an ancient civilization is advanced or not depends on its population and productivity. In addition to historical records and cultural relics, you need to excavate ancient city ruins, large grain warehouses, smelting factories, copper and iron mines, water conservancy projects, battlefield relics that can match its population and productivity

For example, the site of the Acropolis in ancient Greece, measuring 280 meters from east to west and 130 meters from north to south, covers an area of approximately 36400 square meters. But do you know how large the ruins of the capital warehouse used for storing grain in the Han Dynasty are? It is 1120 meters long from east to west, 700 meters wide from north to south, with a circumference of approximately 3330 meters and an area of 784000 square meters. A warehouse is 21.5 times the size of the Acropolis in Athens… The grain warehouse in Luoyang during the Sui and Tang dynasties was 612 meters wide from east to west and 710 meters long from north to south, with a total area of 430000 square meters, equivalent to 11.8 times the size of the Acropolis in Athens.

Speaking of the Han Dynasty Wangchenggang Iron Smelting Site, it is 1100 meters long from east to west and 420 meters wide from north to south, with an area of approximately 335000 square meters, equivalent to nine Acropolis cities in Athens.

There are even earlier and larger iron smelting sites in Linzi, the capital of Qi. There are six iron smelting sites in Linzi, the capital of Qi, with the largest two covering an area of 400000 square meters each. These two sites alone are larger than 22 Acropolis sites in Athens.

This is the difference in scale of civilization.

Without reaching a certain level of scale, productivity cannot be achieved. An ancient civilization with poor land, insufficient food, backward ironmaking technology, and severely inadequate productivity cannot create many “wonders”.