Ancient history, no but really though
The universe is currently 13 billion or so years old, and it gained most of that age in the last 100 years or so. And even human history has gone from the Bible being the oldest possible thing to a fairly recent thing compared to Sumerian clay tablets, never mind the rapidly receding ages of cave paintings.
The latter development really got kickstarted with the deciphering of hieroglyphics, and that was about 200 years ago; cave paintings only became old more recently than that.
Before that, apart from the chosen few who studied Hebrew, ancient civilisation in the West meant Greece and Rome in, by today's standards, not very ancient periods. And however much we learn about Hittites and Sumerians, Greece and Rome remain part of the mental furniture of the civilised person in a way that their predecessors stubbornly don't.
Needless to say, we for one regret this.
But lately we have been engaging in an Epic Not-Quite Flame War on a guitar forum in which persons - fellow guitarists! - are busily holding that pop music these days is just superficial nonsense with half-baked lyrics set to a pounding beat that is only acceptable to an ignorant public that hasn't learned to appreciate the sophistication of the golden age of the Rolling Stones. And we're not even kidding, that's really what they're arguing.
So, leaving aside the fact that the Stones in particular were warming over Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf while being younger, prettier, Britisher and (very especially) whiter, and that "I can't get no satisfaction but I try and I try and I try and I try" might not actually be the very pinnacle of clevertastic (not that there's anything wrong with that, but, you know arguendo), one might profitably quarrel with a denunciation of pop-as-showbusiness in which Elvis never wore sequins, Sinatra was never brylcreamed, and Tin Pan Alley never furnished forgettable pop ditties by the yard to forgettable pop mediocrities.
And further back, there are some fine songs from Victorian music hall, and also some absolute stinkers ("Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow wow" would place high if we were making a list), and yet there was this one moment in the 1960s were everyone decided that if you listened to enough Buffalo Springfield it could prevent Julius Caesar from genociding seven shades of fuck out of Vietnam or stop the carpet-bombing of Gaul or whatever the hell it was, and is wasn't true then and it isn't true now and believeing it is STILL a prerequisite for taking part in a discussion of popular culture.
But at least Marcus Aurelius wrote his own songs, eh?