📖 Diary Post
— The Day I Fell Down the Ancient History Rabbit Hole
August 23, 2026
Today started with a strange realization.
I remembered an incident from some time ago when I was sleeping in a lounge. I woke up because I heard two girls talking very clearly. I was irritated because they sounded like they were chatting without caring that someone was sleeping nearby. I covered myself with a sheet so they wouldn't see my face.
But as I listened, I realized something strange.
I couldn't understand a single word.
Not one.
It didn't sound French, Spanish, Chinese, or like any language I recognized. Yet it sounded completely natural—like two close friends gossiping:
"Hey, you know what? I saw so-and-so..."
I listened for perhaps a minute or two. Their conversation sounded so clear and ordinary that I eventually felt compelled to uncover myself and ask what language they were speaking.
Except...
I was alone.
It was around 3 PM.
I wasn't frightened. I was actually more annoyed and disappointed that the conversation had stopped. 😂 I even wondered whether they had been spirits or something that had somehow become invisible.
And now, because I've been learning about ancient Philippine languages and scripts, I suddenly wondered:
What if what I heard was an ancient language?
Of course, there's no way to know. It could have been a sleep-related auditory experience, an unfamiliar modern language, or something else entirely. But the memory suddenly felt fascinating.
And then I wished I'd had my phone recording.
🪙 From mysterious voices to ancient Philippines
That led me into a huge discussion about precolonial Philippines.
I learned more about binukot, indigenous traditions, old Filipino jewelry and those beautiful coin ornaments I'd seen.
I wondered whether those old coins were actually real, how heavy the necklaces were, whether the traditions still exist, and what old Philippine indigenous jewelry actually looked like.
Then my thoughts moved to something bigger:
Were Filipinos actually poor before the Spanish arrived?
Apparently, the picture is much more complicated than the old idea that civilization somehow arrived with Spain.
There were already communities involved in agriculture, trade, crafts, political organization and regional networks.
Then we got into writing.
I realized that not every Filipino knew Baybayin, just as not everyone in another ancient society necessarily knew how to read its writing system.
Then came the Laguna Copperplate Inscription.
That tiny copper plate suddenly became incredibly fascinating.
It is essentially a legal document from 900 CE, dated using the Saka calendar.
And I learned that Saka 822 corresponds to 900 CE, not 822 CE.
I had initially gotten confused about the numbers going backward and forward.
📜 Then came the Rosetta Stone
I had heard of the Rosetta Stone before but had forgotten what it was.
Then I learned that it contains essentially the same decree in three scripts:
- Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Demotic Egyptian
- Ancient Greek
It was created in 196 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy V.
And suddenly I understood why it was so important.
Scholars already knew Greek.
So the Greek version became a kind of key that helped them decipher the Egyptian writing.
I wondered how they knew the three sections really represented the same decree.
Then I learned that the inscription itself says the decree was to be written in those different scripts.
The stone even contains its own ancient date:
the 9th year of Ptolemy V, 14 Xandikos, corresponding to 196 BCE.
And the stone isn't complete.
Part of it was damaged or missing.
Yet even the surviving portion was enough to help unlock an entire writing system.
👑 Then Alexander appeared
I wondered why Egypt had Greek rulers if Egypt had its own pharaohs.
That led to:
Alexander the Great.
Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BCE.
He was Macedonian and deeply connected with the ancient Greek cultural world.
After his death, his general Ptolemy I established the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt.
Centuries later, Ptolemy V was the king whose decree appears on the Rosetta Stone.
And eventually came Cleopatra VII, the last major ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
I asked why Alexander was called "the Great."
The answer: not because he was necessarily a morally great person, but because his military conquests transformed a huge portion of the ancient world.
He died incredibly young—only 32—probably from an illness, although nobody knows for certain.
🗓️ BCE! CE! BC! AD!
Then I got confused about the dates. 😂
Why were the years going downward?
I learned:
500 BCE → 400 BCE → 300 BCE → 200 BCE → 100 BCE → 1 BCE → 1 CE → 100 CE
And there is no year zero.
BCE = Before Common Era
CE = Common Era
BC and AD use the same numbering.
So:
196 BCE = 196 BC
and
900 CE = AD 900
That finally made sense.
And then I realized something funny:
I had thought the Laguna Copperplate was older than the Rosetta Stone.
It isn't.
The Rosetta Stone is about 1,100 years older.
🏺 And then we went WAY further back
I asked about older writing.
That's when I learned about Sumer.
The earliest known writing appeared in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE.
And the first writing wasn't necessarily poetry or philosophy.
It was often basically:
“This much grain.”
“These sheep.”
“This person received these rations.”
😂
Human civilization apparently invented writing partly because somebody needed to keep track of stuff.
Then I asked who wrote those tablets.
They were probably trained scribes working for temples and administrative institutions.
We don't know the names of most of them.
👑 Gilgamesh
Then came Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk.
There was probably a real historical king named Gilgamesh around 2700 BCE, but the famous stories about him became heavily mythologized.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is about friendship, death and the search for immortality.
And then I noticed something:
There is a flood story.
Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who tells him about a catastrophic flood and how he survived it by building a huge boat.
That sounded very familiar.
Noah.
I wondered:
What if Gilgamesh and Noah were actually the same man?
Apparently, that's unlikely.
The closer comparison is:
Noah ↔ Utnapishtim
rather than Gilgamesh.
But the similarities between the ancient Mesopotamian flood stories and the biblical flood story are fascinating.
And that led us to the phrase...
🐇 “Going down the rabbit hole”
I asked where that expression came from.
It's from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Alice follows the White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and enters an entirely strange world.
And then I realized:
We had absolutely gone down one. 😂
Binukot → jewelry → coins → Baybayin → LCI → Rosetta Stone → Egypt → Alexander → BCE → Sumer → Gilgamesh → Noah → rabbit hole.
📕 The oldest books
Then I asked about the oldest book.
We learned that there's a difference between:
oldest writing
oldest manuscript
oldest complete book
oldest printed book
The Etruscan Gold Book, dating roughly to the 6th century BCE, consists of six thin gold sheets joined together and contains a short religious/funerary text.
Then there is the Diamond Sutra, printed in China in 868 CE.
It's considered the oldest surviving dated, complete printed book.
And incredibly, it survived because it was kept in a dry, sealed cave near Dunhuang.
🏜️ The Library Cave
Then I learned about Mogao Cave 17, also called the Library Cave.
It wasn't just some random natural cave.
The Mogao Caves were a huge Buddhist religious complex along the Silk Road.
Cave 17 was eventually sealed behind a wall and forgotten.
When it was rediscovered around 1900, it contained tens of thousands of manuscripts and other objects.
And they weren't all religious.
There were:
- Buddhist scriptures
- letters
- contracts
- government documents
- tax records
- loans
- medical texts
- calendars
- dictionaries
- school-related material
- paintings
- textiles
- manuscripts in several languages
Even writing exercises by students or apprentice scribes.
That part really amazed me.
Somebody more than a thousand years ago was sitting somewhere in Dunhuang, practicing writing.
And somehow their little piece of work survived.
❤️ Then I thought about my own diary
And suddenly I realized:
There is so much history in the world.
Not just kings and wars.
A clay tablet can tell us about someone counting grain.
A copperplate can tell us about a legal transaction.
A manuscript can show us what someone studied.
A necklace can tell us about someone's culture.
A diary can tell us what an ordinary person felt.
And then I joked:
Maybe my diary could be discovered as a treasure a thousand years from now. 😂
Except...
mine is digital.
That led to another rabbit hole.
What happens to Blogspot if I don't log in for ten years?
I learned that Blogger itself doesn't necessarily disappear just because I stop posting, but Google accounts can be considered inactive after two years, so relying on an old account forever isn't safe.
So if I actually want my 2026 writings to survive into 2126, I should preserve them in multiple ways:
Blogspot 🌐
PDF/A 📕
HTML 💻
Plain text 📄
Original photos 📷
Cloud backup ☁️
Physical backup 💾
Printed archival copy 📜
And periodically migrate the digital copies to newer storage.
🌎 What a strange thought...
People 4,000 years ago didn't know that someone thousands of years later would be studying their little clay tablets.
Someone in 900 CE didn't know that their copperplate would become one of the most important surviving written artifacts from early Philippine history.
Someone in 868 CE couldn't have imagined that their printed Buddhist book would still exist more than a millennium later.
And someone in 2026—me—can sit with a phone and wonder whether two mysterious women I heard talking while I was sleeping were speaking a language I had never heard before.
Maybe one day, if technology and humanity survive long enough, someone will read my words too.
And they'll probably wonder why I spent one afternoon jumping from ancient Philippine history to Egypt, Alexander the Great, Sumer, Gilgamesh, Noah, the Rosetta Stone, ancient schoolchildren and the preservation of my own diary.
😂
I suppose that's what happens when you fall down a rabbit hole. 🐇🕳️❤️
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Thank u (^_^)