Documents And Civilization

Documents, where would we be without them. If there were no documents, the conspiracy theorists would have nothing to hang their collective hats on. Historians would have nothing to back up their ideas about history and we would have no records. Having no documents would probably cause the country to fail. There has long been talk that if all the documents from Wall Street were destroyed, the country could not function because no one would know who owned the wealth and how much they each had. On the other hand, it might just put a crimp in the style of all those thieves out there that rely on forged documents to get access to people's bank accounts and even their identities. When it comes to documents, the most fascinating ones are the ones that seem to contradict what we are told. They might contradict an historical event, or the cause of a war, or even a UFO event.

Jupiter Missile
Photo Source: US Army

Not all documents show facts than are different than we are told. Most actually back up what we are told. I have examined many documents concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis and most backed up the government's side of the story, but there were rumors out there that were probably true, that claim President Kennedy made a deal with Nikita Khrushchev that he would remove missiles from Turkey. The missiles in Turkey were old Jupiter missiles that were said to be on the way out anyway. They were hard to maintain and took time to get ready to launch, since they were liquid fueled. Some societies were more concerned with documents than others. The ancient Egyptians had documents, that were in the form of pyparis and stone. They were insightful, but like most government documents, they usually told the story from the point of view of the government and this favored Egypt.

Roman Denarii
Photo Source:
GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.2 or any later version

The Romans had documents and some still exist today. I remember seeing one that showed the pay for soldiers. The pay when Cesar got in was doubled for the soldiers and they received 225 denarii a year. This was for the ordinary soldier. It is interesting to note that when Caesar died, he left 75 denarii to all Roman soldiers. Documents show that the amount was increased at the time of Severus who made it 500 denarii a year. While these facts are interesting, these types of quartermaster documents are pretty dull stuff. The only reason that this is interesting is that we are talking about such ancient peoples Documents were pretty spotty after the Romans. The English had a pretty good system of documents starting in the 11th century and some of them can be viewed today. There were documents before this, but this is when things really got started.

Ancient Petroglyphs
Photo Source:
Creative Commons Attribution
 ShareAlike 3.0

As time went on documents were filed and kept by many different countries in the western world. But these societies had nothing on the Chinese, who had been keeping documents since the invention of writing in 3,100 BC. This is not to say that documents did not exist before writing. It is hard to tell, but it certainly seems like they did, only they were paintings on cave walls and carvings on rocks known as petroglyphs. A document of animals available for the hunt is pictured on cave walls in France and is about 25,000 years old. Is may seem strange at first, but the best way to preserve documents is to cut them into stone. These should outlast any material that modern man is yet to come up with. That is one way in which our ancestors bested us. There were limitations however, you couldn't pick up a large rock and carry it around, or even file it.

It is beyond a doubt that if we burned all the documents in the world, all of civilization would collapse. We certainly have become very dependent on these things. As I said in the beginning of this article, many people get quite a thrill out of finding documents that seem to contradict what we have been told by lawmakers, companies and such. It has been said that documents were found that prove that tobacco companies knew the ill effects of smoking many years before anyone else did and yet they covered this up. German scientists established a link between cancer and smoking in the 1920s and documents showed this and yet the companies kept advertising in magazines that smoking was good for the digestion and would show someone dressed in a white doctor's coat proclaiming that statement. If it was not for documents, we would have never found that out.

I am constantly being asked for documents as I am sure you are. When I go to the doctor, they want to see cards that show I have insurance. If you need proof of your identity to cash a check in a bank. they ask for a document in the form of your driver's license. Need to buy something and want to use a credit card? That is a document that you will have to produce, except if you are buying online, then you only need the number of the document, the expiration date, and the code on the back. Our entire lives are run by documents. Want to own a gun? In some states you must get a gun permit or document that shows you are allowed to have the gun. One of the first things someone coming to the US has to do is get a document. If they plan to stay, they need a document in the form of a green card. There is one thing for sure, if by chance some of our documents are found by a future archaeologist he probably will say, “what the heck were all these documents for?”

There has been some talk in the past of issuing cards to all citizens with their own special ID numbers on them. I really don't understand why we need more documents to prove who we are, but government and companies seem to think that you can never have enough documents. I remember when the computer first came out and people would say that it was going to reduce the amount of paper records. Well it didn't. Now we seem to have to fill out all sorts of information sheets with duplicate information. I went to the doctor the other day and they gave me seven pages to fill out. Just for fun I noted that I had to put my name on each sheet with the date, my name and address in three different places, my phone number in several places and my email address in two places. I asked the girl at the counter why all the duplicate information and she said the sheets were separated and given to different people. I replied why not enter the data into the computer and print out the sheets from there for each person, it would be simpler. She said things were not done that way. So much for avoiding duplication and extra work.