Part of the reason I am being vague, is I haven't really settled on the locations of my major empires. I'm also determined not to use standard geographic names; the continents should tip people off, even with the shaping that's been done to some of them.
I am definitely conscious of the improbability of making all writing illegible, balanced by the need to keep the past civilizations mysterious to an extent. The Lifemakers for example, have much more documentation available, though paradoxically, the later materials are harder to understand, due to the weirdness of the terms.
Other civilizations had a tendency to put records on items that decay over a few tens of thousands of years, or move away from hardcopy records at all. And there's always the possibility of a disjunction; a civilization "Goes away" so quickly that no keys to its language is left.
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Part of the reason I am being vague, is I haven't really settled on the locations of my major empires. I'm also determined not to use standard geographic names; the continents should tip people off, even with the shaping that's been done to some of them.
I am definitely conscious of the improbability of making all writing illegible, balanced by the need to keep the past civilizations mysterious to an extent. The Lifemakers for example, have much more documentation available, though paradoxically, the later materials are harder to understand, due to the weirdness of the terms.
Other civilizations had a tendency to put records on items that decay over a few tens of thousands of years, or move away from hardcopy records at all. And there's always the possibility of a disjunction; a civilization "Goes away" so quickly that no keys to its language is left.