AKICOLJ: The Easy Way For Characters to Discover What Happened to the Lost Civilisation

Bunn and I watched the Doctor Who story 'Colony in Space'* last night. In that story, there is a scene where the Doctor and the Master are able to determine what happened to the planet's now-primitive-but-once-advanced native race by interpreting a sort of history-book-as-wall-painting.

This is of course, something of a cliche. Or a 'trope', if you will. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' is a particularly fine example, dating from 1931, and an earlier Lovecraft short story (1921's 'The Nameless City' features the same idea).

My AKICOLJ question is: Are there any earlier examples in SF / fantasy, or even in other genres?








* Pertwee / Jo Grant story. I was surprised to find that it wasn't familiar, which means that I can't have seen it before. It was very good. One of the better Pertwees. The sort of space opera that Poul Anderson or Andre Norton would have written in the early 70s, which was when it was broadcast. Truly terrible mining robot though.

The end of GCSEs...?

Plans to shake up education in England have been leaked to the Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162369/Michael-Gove-plans-scrap-dumbed-GCSEs-bring-O-Levels.html (And I think anyone who has ever watched 'The Thick of IT' will be pretty sure that the Education Secretary knew perfectly well about the leak and quite probably ordered it.)

A summary of the plans, as reported:
Scrap GCSEs
Bring back O-levels
Exams will be "explicitly harder"
Scrap the National Curriculum
Less academic pupils would take something else, maybe like the old CSEs
The new exams will "meet or exceed the highest standards in the world for that age group"
A single exam board will set each O-level
2015 GCSEs will be the last
The "five GCSEs A-C" statistic to be scrapped

The LibDems don't like it, but it's not clear if this is for sensible reasons or if Mr Clegg is just pissed off that the Daily Mail knew before he did. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph both love the idea and the Guardian and the unions both hate the idea. (Since GCSEs were introduced by Kenneth Baker, when was the last time you can remember trade unions defending a Thatcher policy so passionately...?)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2162354/Why-Michael-Gove-win-classroom-battle.html
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100166721/michael-gove-and-o-levels-if-hes-really-bringing-them-back-he-deserves-to-be-prime-minister/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jun/21/michael-gove-gcses-teaching-union

So what does everyone think?