Picture a city of 8,000 people with no streets. Houses packed together like molars, Sam Kean writes, and people walked across their neighbors' roofs to get anywhere. That was Çatalhöyük, in what's now Turkey, from about 7500 to 6000 B.C., long before writing. By 1952 it was a grassy mound 60 feet high, and nobody alive knew a city was in it. Michael Patrick Brady reviews Kean's The Museum of Lost Things in Thursday's Journal, Oct. 15.
The book, from National Geographic at 400 pages and $35, is a tour of what history misplaced. The bones of Peking Man. Russia's Amber Room, stolen in World War II. The Antikythera Mechanism, a mechanical calendar from the second century B.C. that only surfaced in a Greek shipwreck in 1901. Kean's line, quoted by Brady, is that “for every object we find, millions of others remain missing.”
Small things go missing easily. Whole cities are the stranger case. A British archaeologist, James Mellaart, found Çatalhöyük in 1952 during a survey. Under the grass were murals about 8,000 years old, statuettes and as many as 480 skeletons, many buried under the floors of the houses. We still don't know what the people called the place. The Indus Valley civilization was bigger. Around 2600 B.C. it held about a million people in 1,500 settlements over an area double the size of Montana, with dams, reservoirs and early sewers. It faded by 1900 B.C. and was forgotten for nearly 4,000 years, until Rakhaldas Banerji dug at Mohenjo-daro in 1922.
Why they were lost
Kean offers a reason, as Brady tells it. The Indus people made small, fine things, jewelry and miniatures, rather than giant statues, and that most likely helped the world forget them. Nothing big was left standing to ask about. Kean is hopeful about the tools coming. In 2015, lidar scans found a network of 'garden cities' under the Amazon canopy. The oldest date to about 500 B.C., with plazas, ponds and roads. The book runs by theme rather than by date, with chapters such as Lost Bones, Lost Loot and Lost Graves. Brady says Kean is a little too eager to prove it isn't a stuffy history, with the odd glib joke, and that the enthusiasm wins anyway.
Our read
We file this under Estate, with a Behavioral note. A civilization of a million people dropped out of memory for nearly 4,000 years. Kean's guess is that it left nothing big enough to catch the eye, and nobody kept telling its story. Families are the same, only faster. The account nobody else knows about, the policy in a drawer, the password in one head, the story of where the money came from. None of it is lost on purpose. It's lost because no one was the curator.
Here's the connection to your own plan. Your plan's document list is the museum catalog for your household. This week, check one thing. Pick a trusted person and ask them whether they could find your accounts, your insurance policies and your passwords by Friday without you. If the honest answer is no, write the inventory this month and tell them where it lives. Çatalhöyük waited thousands of years for someone to notice the mound. Your family shouldn't have to dig. The umbrella does its job only if it's by the door when the rain comes, and a review is where we check the door.