Im not sure knowledge of 3000 years ago of people living in very different society would help much to solve the problems we are facing today.
I still think when human mind think about same problem in same maner they will always come up with similar solution, otherwise they would be no consensus over mathematics.
If the solution to our problems was already thought before, we will come up with same solutions in the future.
There is no reason why solutions found in those ancient time cannot be found again if they are what we need.
I believe most of the essential was kept over sumarized by great thinkers of their time, its a bit information darwinism, what is useful or good is kept over, things that are useless are forgotten, and there are always historian to keep the useful things around, and thinker to summarize the useful bits in synthized form to be passed over, and people to learn or express them when they are needed or useful to solve their problem, or to find them again when they are needed.
Im more progressive than conservative i guess.
I'm an individual. ;) I don't identify with either of those. In fact in this day and age those labels are rather meaningless. :) They mean vastly different things depending upon who you speak to.
The way our minds operate is similar to the past and that indeed would be useful. Yet thinking is not the same thing as knowledge. The presence of a tool does not define everything that can be made with that tool.
Im not too much into worshiping information graveyards :)
The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin. - jean baudrillard
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0113.html
History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this "awareness of history on the part of cinema," as one congratulated oneself on the "entrance of politics into the university." Same misunderstanding, same mystification. The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization.
The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukaemia of history and of politics, this haemorrhage of values-it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk-a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle Žpoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war-the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro-a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political., it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro). - jean baudrillard
Destruction of temple or old monuments is more concerning, because they still add something to the now because they are pretty, have economic value for tourism etc but not especially for the information of the worship of 1000 year ago which i doubt can help much with our problem of today.
Even the fascists dont seem to have lot of imagination nowdays, still waving the flags of the past, their motion is already stillborn :p