WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

Mysteries that remain unsolved

Dialogue: The Edge of Knowledge

H.: You’ve told me what we know about the Sumerians. What don’t we know?

C.: Where to begin? We don’t know where they came from. We don’t know why their language has no relatives. We don’t know how they governed before we have records of governance. We don’t know what their music sounded like, how they danced, what they dreamed about. The texts give us a fraction of a civilization.

H.: But we have thousands of tablets.

C.: We do. Mostly administrative records—inventories, receipts, contracts. It’s as if future archaeologists reconstructed our civilization entirely from tax returns and shipping manifests. They’d learn a lot. They’d miss almost everything that matters.

H.: What about other civilizations? The Egyptians, the Hittites—

C.: Each has its gaps. The Egyptians left monuments and tombs, but their everyday literature is largely lost. The Hittites left a royal archive, but we found it by accident—if the excavators had dug twenty meters in another direction, we might not know the Hittite language at all.

H.: That’s unsettling.

C.: It should be. We treat what survives as representative. It isn’t. Survival is accident. A library burns, a city floods, a conqueror decides to erase rather than preserve. What we know is what happened not to be destroyed.

H.: Are there things we’ll never know?

C.: Certainly. Some ancient scripts remain undeciphered—Proto-Elamite, Linear A, others. Without a bilingual text or some lucky breakthrough, we may never read them. The voices they preserve are silent permanently.

H.: That seems tragic.

C.: It is. Imagine someone wrote the most profound poem ever composed, pressed it into clay, and the clay survived—but in a script no one can read. The words exist. The meaning is gone.

H.: Has that happened?

C.: Almost certainly. We have Proto-Elamite tablets. They’re administrative—we can tell that much from the format. But we can’t read the words. Someone’s accounts, someone’s records, sitting in museums, mute.

H.: Could they be deciphered eventually?

C.: Possibly. Decipherment requires certain conditions—enough text, some external clues, patterns that can be cracked. Sometimes those conditions are met decades or centuries after discovery. Sometimes they’re never met.

H.: So we’re surrounded by mysteries that might be solved and mysteries that never will be.

C.: Yes. And we often can’t tell which is which. Scholars worked on Egyptian hieroglyphics for centuries before Champollion cracked them. Linear B resisted until Michael Ventris in 1952. Each seemed impossible until it wasn’t.

H.: But some remain impossible.

C.: Some remain impossible so far. The honest answer is: we don’t know what we don’t know. There might be a key to Proto-Elamite buried in an unexcavated archive, waiting. Or there might not be.

H.: How do you live with that uncertainty?

C.: You accept it. The past is not fully recoverable. Every historian, every archaeologist works with fragments and makes the best sense they can. The alternative—pretending we know more than we do—is worse.

H.: What’s the value in studying what we can’t understand?

C.: The gaps teach humility. They remind us that civilizations rise and fall, that knowledge can be lost, that what seems permanent isn’t. The Sumerians thought their cities would last forever. The cities are mounds of dirt. The tablets survive by luck.

H.: That’s bleak.

C.: It’s honest. And there’s another side. The gaps also teach us what we value. We notice what’s missing because we care about it. The lost tombs, the undeciphered scripts, the vanished libraries—we mourn them because we know they mattered.

H.: So absence is meaningful too.

C.: Absence is evidence. When something should exist and doesn’t, we ask why. Sometimes the answer reveals more than presence would.

H.: Such as?

C.: The Ark of the Covenant. The most sacred object in ancient Israel, described in detail in Exodus—and then it vanishes from the record. No account of its destruction. No clear statement of what happened. Just silence.

H.: And the silence means?

C.: Possibly that something traumatic happened, something the scribes couldn’t bring themselves to record. Possibly that it was hidden so well even the memory was suppressed. Possibly that the object never existed as described. Each interpretation tells us something—about the object, about the people, about what they could and couldn’t face.

H.: You’re saying mysteries are informative even when they’re not solved.

C.: Mysteries are where knowledge meets its limits. The limits are part of the picture. You can’t understand what we know without understanding what we don’t.

H.: Then let’s look at the limits.

C.: Let’s look at the silence.