Welcome to Gaia! :: Ancient Civilizations

That is a really really good suggestion, I wanna see some of those documents (translated of course) but chances are if they were forced to release them, a lot of them would be hidden, or simply bought by the vatican making them their own personal property. I know that it's rare but you can actually look through some of the libraries but like... the good stuff is probably way hidden xD
As for the OP though, I made a nice topic about an ancient civilization called the Sumerians, if you ignore the UFO stuff if you're not into that... there's still a nice bit in there about history and it's interesting to boot =]
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/science-and-technology/aliens-o-o/t.37974621/

Most ancient archives are actually pretty boring.

There might be a few shreds of vaguely interesting thousand-year-old gossip in the Vatican archives -- or any other archives you may care about -- but in even in the best case, you really can't expect to find much. No, seriously: what is the most interesting thing you could really expect to pull out of the Vatican archives? The old ones, say, nothing from the twentieth century. Letters documenting a thousand-year-old affair? The first draft of the Bible? Heresies revolving around the interpretation of boring parts of the scripture?

Let's face it: there's probably no map to the Aztec gold or a life-granting chalice. We already know enough dirt on the past popes -- affairs, coups, corruption -- that no one really would be surprised if some more surfaced. We've got enough heresies going right now that digging up ancient ones isn't going to get a rise out of anyone. Biographies of minor saints and hundreds of slightly different histories written by hundreds of authors over hundreds of years aren't really the page turners you'd hope for. Not everything turns into a diamond after you bury it. A boring, uninspired treatise by a Dark Ages priest, the only surviving copy of which is in some Vatican library, is probably still a boring, uninspired treatise a thousand years later.

And what's left? The vast bulk of any ancient archive -- whether it's scrolls from Greece and Rome, Sumerian tablets, or the Vatican archives -- is going to be bureaucratic paperwork. A thousand years of accounting records, tax records, inventories, and letters discussing the minutiae of running a bureaucracy. Minutes of meetings where nothing happened. Recommendations to break ground on a new abbey, which, hey, they did, or they didn't, and it doesn't really matter that much one way or the other.

Seriously, folks. This is what you have to look forward to if you learn an ancient language. A half dozen epics, a handful of interesting philosophies, a couple of juicy personal letters which have survived the ages, an odd speech or two, and piles upon piles upon piles of bureaucratic drivel.


(Of course, the real historians are interested in the drivel, because you can learn a lot about a civilization from its drivel, but seriously. The average ancient archive is so boringly mundane it could make your eyes bleed.)