The word of “ancient” in our vocabulary dependes a lot in how we established the perception of time around the human evolution. We use today the Gregorian calendar as everyone knows. As you well asked

What about fifthy thousand?
or five hundred thousand? — young god

I guess this is just order in our perception of reality inside of history.

What I mean here is this: Ancient world is known that historic because it is around “before Christ” time lapse. Everything in history which we have evidence that happened in the past like Greek, Romans or Egyptians and its complexity are organised in “Ancient world” because it was literally an ancient phenomena until the Gregorian calendar appeared, i.e. Mycenaean Greek goes from 1400 to 1200 BF.

So it doesn’t matter here if that villages ever knew they were the “ancient ones”. It is something historian accorded to do for put an order in our chronology.

Ancient does not refer to a specific timeframe. Generally it means the distant past - which can encompass a very wide period. Words like 'ancient' are thrown around with cavalier imprecision all the time.

The word "ancient" has two meanings that are, in my humble opinion, absolute and relative. I concede that the word itself has no precise definition and is loosely applied to time periods that extend, at a minimum, to thousands of years but, for some reason, it seems to be restricted to human history and that too to the transitional phase between hunter-gatherer societies and the birth of civilizations. That's the absolute meaning of "ancient".

Coming to the relative definition of "ancient", the word is used to describe time-gaps between two objects, one being recent and the other relatively older. I see young people often use the word "ancient" when they talk about adults and elderly people.

:joke:

. Truth is ancient ...

. You're ancient ...

. You're like a seed ...

. The seed is immortal, it cannot die ...

today, even a thousand years counts as 'ancient' but what does it truly mean? — young god

"belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence" is a useful definition when the word is used FORMALLY.

The Roman Empire is ancient, because it is in the distant past AND it no longer exists. The Papacy is not ancient because, even though it is, what--1500 years old [becoming more significant after the collapse of the RE around 500 AD]--it is still very much in existence. The League of Nations is not ancient. While it no longer exists, it was founded only 100 years ago.

My shopping list from last week is INFORMALLY ancient history.

There are other words available to describe the past:

Pre-cambrian (before 540 Million Years Ago)
Cambrian (540 – 489 Million Years Ago) ...
Ordovician (489 – 444 Million Years Ago) ...
Silurian (444 – 416 Million Years Ago) ...
Devonian (416 – 360 Million Years Ago) ...
Carboniferous (360 – 300 Million Years Ago) ...
Permian (300 – 250 Million Years Ago) ...
Triassic (250 – 201.6 Million Years Ago)
Jurassic (201.6 – 145.5 Million Years Ago)
Cretaceous (145.5 – 65.5 Million Years Ago)
Tertiary (65.5 – 2.6 Million Years Ago)
Quaternary (2.6 Million Years Ago – Present)
Anthropocene Epoch - we are in it


primevil
primordial
paleolithic (paleo- older or ancient, especially relating to the geological past
stone age
neolithic period
prehistoric
bronze age
iron age
classical
medieval
early modern
modern
modern

"belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence" is a useful definition when the word is used FORMALLY.

The Roman Empire is ancient, because it is in the distant past AND it no longer exists. The Papacy is not ancient because, even though it is, what--1500 years old [becoming more significant after the collapse of the RE around 500 AD]--it is still very much in existence. The League of Nations is not ancient. While it no longer exists, it was founded only 100 years ago. — Bitter Crank

Well said. :100: