We in our modern society tend to think of time as a straight line, always progressing forward. This leads us to believe that we are the most advanced society the world has ever known....

Yes, but I think we try to take everything we can from previous civilizations to go better, and, at least from what we know, we have better technologies and are most advanced.

To add to this, it seems the older they are the more advanced their construction techniques were. Sites such as Gobleki Tepe and Baalbek show many stages of construction over vast amounts of time with the most advanced being the oldest and a clear degradation of building techniques over time.

From this I suppose they begined to lost some of those techniques over time, maybe they were at war, or some king said : "i don't like these".

We look at our technological wonders... and think we are the most advanced society to have ever lived. Yet at the same time we are polluting our land, water and air and our forests are disappearing at alarming rates. Cancer, autism and sociopathy are at epidemic proportions when they were virtually unheard of in so-called "simpler" times.

You talk about a cycle, maybe they did bad things in another way, who knows, we don't have a lot of dara from that era. One of them could be sickness, they could have plages worst than ours.

Yet... the most recent discoveries in science seem to indicate that the matter we thought was king is but an illusion created by that great mystery called consciousness that we seem to have forgotten the true nature of.

Wait, matter is not an illusion, not as it is seen by normal people, and neither by scientists. Maybe now we know that it can become energy, that's another issue.

This cycle takes over 26000 years to complete and yet the ancients had charted and measured this apparently through the whole cycle at least once. Still, our modern scholars tell us that civilization began just a few thousand years ago.

Maybe ancient charted and measured it, but they didn't pass everything completely clear. On the other hand, scholars, generally, are not very open to new ideas, any era.

It is darkest just before the dawn and all of these traditions predicted that we would be dawning on a new era of thinking right about now.

If they have been wrong sometime, i hope this is not one of them.