Long ago, in the sands of ancient Egypt, a god stood before a mythical pharaoh, proud of the gift he had brought to humanity. This was Thoth, the god of wisdom, and his gift was the craft of writing.
“Look at the gift that I am giving Humanity,” Thoth said. Writing, he argued, was a “wonderful thing” because it would let people “preserve so much that you would otherwise lose”.
But the pharaoh did not celebrate it. Looking at this new technology, he answered with a warning.
“No,” the pharaoh replied, “you have not given us a wonderful gift”. Instead, he said, “You have destroyed the art of memory”. He feared that because of writing, people “will forget everything”. Even worse, he believed that “words will roam free around the world not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context”.
This myth points to a deep shift that happens when a culture adopts the written word and slowly begins to “gradually lose your memory”.
The Art of Preserving the Stars
For civilizations built on oral traditions, memory was not just a personal skill. It was the main way complex knowledge survived across generations. These cultures could preserve information for very long periods of time.
That need for cultural memory was especially important for ancient astronomers and storytellers who watched the majesty of the heavens. They tracked cosmic events that move too slowly to be understood within one human life.
One of the most astonishing observations was the precession of the equinoxes. This slow cycle comes from the Earth’s “wobble” on its axis. The full cycle, the time it takes for the constellations of the zodiac to shift back through their positions, takes roughly 25,920 years.
To notice it, people had to track a shift of only one degree every 72 years. Knowledge like that could not stay with one person. It had to be carefully passed on.
Encoding Knowledge in Myth
It appears that some ancient culture, described by scholars as an “almost unbelievable ancestor culture,” understood the process of precession. To help that knowledge survive for millennia, they used one of the strongest tools they had: the great story.
Human beings remember stories. By placing complex information, such as the astronomical data of precession, inside myth, the knowledge could survive even when the storyteller did not fully understand the science behind it.
This ancient knowledge seems to have spread across the world through a system of pressional numbers. The governing number is 72, taken directly from the rate of precession. Related numbers include 108 (72 + 36) and 54 (108 divided by 2).
These numbers appear again and again in global mythology, suggesting a single common source for this ancestral knowledge:
- In the ancient Egyptian myth of the god Osiris, there were 72 conspirators involved in his killing.
- The Rig Veda, a sacred text, contains references to the massive cycle number of 432,000, which is a direct multiple of 72.
- At Angkor Thom in Cambodia, the bridge depicts figures holding the serpent Vuki, churning the Milky Ocean. There are 54 figures on each side, totaling 108 (a pressional number).
So the knowledge of the stars was protected not only by stone tablets or papyrus scrolls, but by the very thing the pharaoh wanted to save: the art of memory. If we treat myths and ancient traditions seriously, we may find knowledge preserved by people who understood that a great library does not always sit on a shelf. Sometimes it lives inside the faithful repetition of a carefully built story.