The title kind of says it all, but my essential question is what did cultures think of ancient monuments before the widespread knowledge of history and archaeology.
For example, what did the Arabs think of the pyramids, or the Catholics about Roman colosseums?
Did they think the creators were heretics? Did they have any myths / legends about them? Or were they just generally ignored until people started caring more about history?
While there are plenty of ancient monuments that people can discuss, here are a few threads about the Pyramids and Stonehenge.
Pyramids:
Here is an answer from /u/WelfontheShelf about the sultan Al-Aziz Uthman and the Pyramids.
[Here] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6h11h4/the_new_assassins_creed_game_is_set_in_ptolemaic/diur0x2/) is an answer from /u/khosikulu and /u/sunagainstgold about the Pyramids throughout the Classical and Medieval eras.
Here is an answer from /u/farquirer about what Islamic scholars thought about the Pyramids.
Stonehenge:
/u/mikedash has written, not just once, but twice about this topic, first discussing an overall summary of later people's thoughts on Stonehenge and then discussing Roman and Medieval ideas about Stonehenge.
This answer from /u/raggedpanda discusses Old English poem about Stonehenge.
Finally, /u/alriclofgar discusses in this answer what the Roman and Anglo-Saxons thought about Stonehenge.
Hopefully this is a good starting point for such a broad question!
I have an earlier answer that might interest you!
Textually, we have an incredibly rich trove of accounts of visitors to Rome. On one hand, the collection is perhaps not quite as interesting as we might want: the Venn diagram of "people who were both literate and whose writings are likely to have survived" and "people with an awareness of a basic history of the Roman Empire and its decline" is basically the first circle inside the second, especially from the mid-11th century on. On the other hand, their shared knowledge of and appreciation for ancient Rome offers a good basis for comparison of different perspectives.
Benjamin of Tudela is a good place to start for an important reason: in the face of Rome's role at the heart of medieval Christianity, Benjamin was Jewish! He came from Navarre in Iberia, and his meandering travel account catalogues the Jewish communities he traveled among around the Mediterranean. You can read his full account of Rome and Roman Jews here (Cntl/Cmd+F for "Rome" is easiest if the link target doesn't work), but to excerpt a few bits:
There are many wonderful structures in the city, different from any others in the world. Including both its inhabited and ruined parts, Rome is about twenty-four miles in circumference. In the midst thereof there are eighty palaces belonging to eighty kings who lived there, each called Imperator, commencing from King Tarquinius down to Nero and Tiberius, who lived at the time of Jesus the Nazarene, ending with Pepin, who freed the land of Sepharad from Islam, and was father of Charlemagne.
There is a palace outside Rome (said to be of Titus). The Consul and his 300 Senators treated him with disfavour, because he failed to take Jerusalem till after three years, though they had bidden him to capture it within two.
In Rome is also the palace of Vespasianus, a great and very strong building; also the Colosseum...There were battles fought here in olden times, and in the palace more than 100,000 men were slain, and there their bones remain piled up to the present day. The king caused to be engraved a representation of the battle and of the forces on either side facing one another, both warriors and horses, all in marble, to exhibit to the world the war of the days of old.
In Rome there is a cave which runs underground, and catacombs...In the church of St. John in the Lateran there are two bronze columns taken from the Temple, the handiwork of King Solomon, each column being engraved "Solomon the son of David." The Jews of Rome told me that every year upon the 9th of Ab they found the columns exuding moisture like water.
Although Benjamin observes that some of Rome is standing/inhabited and some is ruins, he does not distinguish which is which in his description (nor does that distinction allow for, as we will see, inhabited ruins). However, he is keenly aware of the history of the ancient Roman buildings and those who lived in them. Those stories--what Rome was--matter more than what they are. He takes note of great buildings, natural features, and smaller monuments. I also think the detail about the columns of the Temple seized and appropriated into a Christian church are fascinating and significant. Especially in recounting the miracle story of the local Jewish community, Benjamin shows that Rome could have a sacred geography for non-Christians--something I, at least, am not used to thinking of.
Notably absent from Benjamin's record, on the other hand, is commentary on the fall of Rome. For this, believe it or not, we have to turn to Christian writers. In their stylings, a very real admiration for classical antiquity aligns with the medieval Christian theology of history that saw a "world grown old," decaying towards apocalypse and only ever renewable by God. 11th-12th century cleric Hildebert of Lavardin, eventually archbishop of Tours, wrote two famous poems de Roma which both celebrate and mourn the ancient city as he found it at the very end of the 11th century. Here's an excerpt from one:
The city now is fallen; I can find
No worthier epitaph than “this was Rome.”
Yet neither the flight of years, nor flame nor sword
Could fully wipe away its loveliness
[…] Bring wealth, new marble, and the help of gods
Let craftsmen’s hands be active in their work—
Yet shall these standing walls no equal find,
Nor can these ruins even be restored
The care of men once built so great a Rome
The care of gods could not dissolve its stones
Divinities admire their faces carved,
And wish themselves the equal of these forms
Nature could not make gods as fair of face
As man created images of gods
With Hildebert, praises of Rome move into a more emotional register, but also a more intellectual one rather than practical/geographical. His words are grounded in ancient Rome's buildings and especially its art but he evokes the splendor of a lost civilization rather than the immediate materiality of buildings rooted in history. It's also significant that Hildebert's praise, while overtly of the artistic qualities of ancient Roman art, is actually directed at the human artists. He elevates the abilities of humans of old especially compared to present ones, whose skills and vision could never possibly measure up.
A few years later, the English traveler known as Master Gregory famously followed Hildebert's footsteps to Rome. Gregory actually knew one of Hildebert's poems--he quotes it in his own little travel guide-like account!--but takes his commentary a step further.
The sight of the whole city is, I think, most wonderful, where there is such a multitude of towers, so great a number of palaces, as none can count. When I first saw the city from far off, I was overwhelmed and remembered Caesar's view of it, when having conquered the Gauls and crossed the Alps, he exclaimed substantial quote from Caesar...
This beauty passing understanding I long admired, and I thanked God who...yet has magnified there the works of man with immeasurable beauty. For even if Rome falls into complete ruin, nothing that is intact can be compared with it. As has been said [by Hildebert, in fact]:
Nothing can equal Rome, Rome even in ruins
Your ruins speak aloud your former greatness
The ruin of Rome shows clearly, I think, that all temporal things are near their end, especially when the worldly center of all things, Rome, daily languishes and decays.
Rome as the "worldly" center of the word is one of those little noteworthy turns of phrase. In medieval Christian sacred geography, the center of the world was Jerusalem. Here, though, Gregory focuses on the human component in Christian world/salvation history--and he is even more explicit than Hildebert about the decline of the present from earlier greatness.
We're used to a "decline and fall of Rome" narrative as Christians supposedly ruining the great rationality/progress/technology of pagan/philosophical Rome. Medieval Christians actually took part in the view of a Roman golden age compared to their own; for them, however, the rise of Christianity was less a cause of decline than an inevitable step towards ultimate divine redemption.
Gregory relates one more detail I want to highlight here: he tells us that many of the statues from the days of pagan Roman glory were dismantled by (very important) Pope Gregory I! We can agree on one hand it's quite noteable that he's repeating a story about Christians actively opposing the preservation of pagan art, and not very approvingly. On the other, this Gregory projects the 'desecration' onto another Gregory several centuries in the past.
In fact, the appropriation and remixing of ancient Rome into a Christian city was ongoing throughout the Middle Ages. Even in the later 15th century, with "Renaissance" adulation of classical antiquity building to a fever pitch, prelates in Rome were still plunder the Colosseum and deserted palaces for stones for their own lavish building projects!
This brings us to the last thing I want to talk about: archaeological evidence for "what people thought" of Roman ruins, evidence that perhaps helps us get beyond the view of the absolute elite of the elite of high medieval society. The Colosseum is the famous example here, since it enjoyed many afterlives throughout the Middle Ages. Most famously, it eventually became a little neighborhood for artisans! Quarrymen and blacksmiths set up residence, even building the occasional shop for horseshoes and other goods. Eventually, a monastery was constructed in and around part of it. And all the while, tantalizing blocks of stone were usurped for building projects elsewhere.
Visitors to Rome saw "ruins" and "desertion," and the ashes of of past splendor. People who lived in Rome may well have seen that, too. But they also saw promise for the present and the future: what could be out of what had been.
Adding to u/sunagainstgold's excellent answer on Rome:
In Rome we can look at two examples—the Colosseum and the Pantheon—and track them over time. Speaking very broadly, people from centuries following the buildings’ construction could be both in awe of such structures and also happy to pillage them for materials. Rome was famously (infamously?) pillaged following Antiquity, as people stripped marble to use on other projects or burning it in kilns to make lime for construction. During the Middle Ages, e.g., all the seating in the Circus Maximus was stripped and burned for lime. Builders were also happy to use columns from “pagan” structures in the construction or restoration of churches: in the 12th century the churches of San Clemente, Santa Maria in Trastevere, and Quattro Coronati all were constructed in part with columns taken from earlier buildings. But texts like the 1143 Mirabilia Urbis Romae (The Marvels of Rome), a sort of guidebook to the city and testament to the 12th-century interest in antiquity, also indicate an interest in and appreciation for the city’s classical past in and of itself and not just as a convenient source of building materials. That said, the Mirabilia isn’t entirely reliable in its discussion of how ancient buildings were used—e.g., the Colosseum was described as a “Temple of the Sun” rather than a sporting arena.
[As a quick aside: people were already looting ancient monuments in the period we still consider to be “Antiquity”: e.g., the Arch of Constantine, from c. 315 CE, features work taken from several earlier monuments—built under Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius—and repurposed for the arch. The process of reusing materials from famous “ancient” monuments has a long and well-established history.]
First, let’s look at the Colosseum in particular (built c. 80 CE): first, it’s worth remembering that this structure itself was reusing space that had previously been part of the Emperor Nero’s enormous villa. Eventually, the building itself was repurposed in subsequent centuries. The last gladiatorial contest in the Colosseum (originally known as the Flavian Amphitheater) was 434; wild animal hunts continued somewhat longer, but by the 7th century the building was totally out of use for its original purpose. By that time a small church had been established in the auditorium and the arena itself was being used as a cemetery. The vaulted arches of the structure were being used to house workshops, storerooms, and dwellings.
By the 15th century (if not earlier), it was being looted for stone: e.g., over a period of nine months in 1452 the Lombard contractor Giovanni Foglia transported over 2,500 cartloads of travertine stone from the Colosseum. In the 1460s, parts of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome were constructed using travertine from the Colosseum. This is mentioned both in construction documents as well as later accounts. Interestingly, Renaissance builders from these decades sometimes reworked the Colosseum’s materials into compositions that—despite being in a new setting, on a new building—called to mind the Colosseum’s design! Thus while it’s likely that convenience played a role in using this stone there was also something deeper at play—i.e., an interplay of reusing ancient materials on modern structures that themselves called to mind the glory of Antiquity.
Let's also consider the Pantheon (built c. 125 CE), which ultimately had a second life as a Christian church (which likely helped its preservation, although it wasn’t immune to being looted for materials): in 609 it was consecrated as Santa Maria Rotonda and dedicated to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs. An altar was placed in the building along with an icon of the Madonna and Child. In the Renaissance, the Pantheon became the burial site of the painter Raphael (among others)—which would have been a great honor. In the 17th century the bronze ceiling from the building’s portico was stripped and melted down for other projects (or for cannon). Belltowers were also added in the 17th century, which can be seen in this image.
In short, speaking very broadly, Rome's ruins were a source of wonder, admiration, and—critically—building materials.
The literature on Rome through the ages is vast, but an accessible account of how the city was perceived over the centuries is Matthew Sturgis’s book When in Rome: 2000 Years of Roman Sightseeing (2011). Some other sources I’ve relied on (in addition to some teaching notes and a short essay on ruins by Roland Mayer) include:
J. K. Hyde, Literacy and its uses: Studies on late medieval Italy, ed. Daniel Waley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)
Antje Middeldorf Kosegarten, “Remarks on Some Medieval Descriptions of Sculpture,” Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral and Its Sculpture, Florence, Cadmo 2001
Michael J. Waters, “Reviving Antiquity with Granite: Spolia and the Development of Roman Renaissance Architecture,” Architectural History 59 (2016)
