I bet you didnt know that

At its peak the Roman Empire had nearly half a million kilometres of roads, with nearly 100,000 of them paved, with bridges and tunnels along their way. A road system not bettered until well into the early modern age. They had a military use of course but mostly it was for trade. Romans were the shopkeepers of the world at the time and it's no use if you can produce large quantities of stuff people want to buy if you can't get it to the buyers.

The Greeks understood the general principle of steam power, but used it for kids toys and adult playthings and magic tricks.

The Aztecs built their vast empire and civilisation without the wheel. Well, they had the wheel, but only used it for again kids toys and playthings.

The Egyptians built their huge pyramids with stone and copper tools. They were a Bronze Age civilisation at the time. No iron. They had some iron ceremonial daggers, only available to Pharaoh, but they were made from of all things iron meteorites. The iron in them is much purer and can be heated with their copper based furnaces and beaten, it didn't need to be smelted.

Speaking of copper in the ancient world the island of Cyprus was chock full of the stuff. The origin of the name Cyprus might have been copper, but it became the word we have today, by way of the Latin and the Romans seeing it as "Cyprus metal"(from Cyprium to Cuprium(sp).

Speaking of copper and astronomers... Tycoe Brahe, the last of the naked eye astronomers and all round obsessive genius had a false nose made of copper, fashioned for him because of a duel he fought. And lost. Where it got lopped off. History doesn't record the state of the other bloke. Apparently such prosthetic noses were common enough at the time, what with duels and such. Or excessive picking. My astronomer has no nose. How does he smell? Terrible.

The Egyptian ankh symbol was associated with copper. Speaking of hieroglyphics, Egyptian hieroglyphs had no vowels as we think of them, so just consonants. They could be read right to left, left to right, up to down and all over the place. To indicate how to read the text you look at the animal symbols and whichever way they're facing that's the direction of text.

Wibbs wrote: »

At its peak the Roman Empire had nearly half a million kilometres of roads, with nearly 100,000 of them paved, with bridges and tunnels along their way. A road system not bettered until well into the early modern age. They had a military use of course but mostly it was for trade. Romans were the shopkeepers of the world at the time and it's no use if you can produce large quantities of stuff people want to buy if you can't get it to the buyers.

I remember reading/hearing somewhere that a wax tablet was found - it was a "letter" from a soldier to either his family or to his friends, and in it he was complaining about the dreadful state of the roads.

Other wax tablets were found to contain children's schoolwork - one included a comment from the child's teacher that read, more or less, "You could do better if you applied yourself more".

Some things really never do change.

:D:D

kingchess

If I remember correctly the city of Carthage mass produced ships for its Navy,in a sort of production line?

Wibbs wrote: »

Speaking of copper and astronomers... Tycoe Brahe,

And how did he die ?

Wibbs wrote: »

The Greeks understood the general principle of steam power, but used it for kids toys and adult playthings and magic tricks.

The Aztecs built their vast empire and civilisation without the wheel. Well, they had the wheel, but only used it for again kids toys and playthings.

The Japanese also knew of the wheel and like the Incas didn't use it because no flat roads what with all the mountains and stuff.

The Greek steam engine was a toy not practical for power. To get to the first practical steam engine you needed good metallurgy. It took a lot of engineering to get a steam turbine more powerful than piston steam engines.

New Home wrote: »

I remember reading/hearing somewhere that a wax tablet was found - it was a "letter" from a soldier to either his family or to his friends, and in it he was complaining about the dreadful state of the roads.
..
Some things really never do change. :D:D

Roll the clock back to 3,750 years ago and Nanni was sending a letter to Ea-Nasir complaining about the quality of the copper he'd bought and the rudely his servants were treated.

New Home wrote: »

I remember reading/hearing somewhere that a wax tablet was found - it was a "letter" from a soldier to either his family or to his friends, and in it he was complaining about the dreadful state of the roads.

Other wax tablets were found to contain children's schoolwork - one included a comment from the child's teacher that read, more or less, "You could do better if you applied yourself more".

Some things really never do change. :D:D

What's impressive is that Rome had a postal service of sorts and a remarkably rapid information transmission service too. At least for the nobles and important types. On the morning when Vesuvius blew its top and buried Pompeii and Herculanum the emperor at the time (whose name escapes

) knew by lunchtime that the poo had hit the fan. They tried to evacuate the place from the nearby ports and apparently had some success.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

And how did he die ?

Kidney infection? Something like that anyway? I genuinely tend to avoid google, unless I'm looking for new stuff to me. I figure I'll get mind lazy if I rely on the interwebs too much. How our memories operate and have operated over time intrigues me. It also intrigued different famous folks in history. IIRC Plato was dubious about writing things down. Figuring that once a debate was written it tended to concrete an idea against further debate. Look how long Aristotle's reality held sway. That was before mass dessimination of the word and minds and ideas via printing of course. Julius Caesar in his dairy(and they're worth a read) noted the "Celtic" bards and their prodigious knowledge and memories would be lost if they became literate. Why remember if you have an external memory at one's disposal? With the coming of the electronic Information Age that's more in play than ever before. We have many WikiExperts at large. Not necessarily* a bad thing of course. Since the Age of Printing information has flowed so fast and changes so quickly and ever moreso today, that we need that external memory. Even when those things we look up and know are almost certainly already out of date, somewhere.

*The one word I really need spellcheck on. No matter how I've tried I can never quite get it right, or at least very sporadically. A mental block as it were.

Mediterranean, fine, necessarily*goes to drop down spellcheck* not so much.

New Home wrote: »

I remember reading/hearing somewhere that a wax tablet was found - it was a "letter" from a soldier to either his family or to his friends, and in it he was complaining about the dreadful state of the roads.

IIRC Near Hadrian's wall(to keep the mad bastid Scots out. In fairness a bunch of Bay City Roller fans in woad intent on really ruining your day needs a wall), where a load of such tablets were found. The local boggy conditions preserved the wood they were written on. The Romans also used wax tablets in a vague booklet form for note taking. Soft lead "pages" were another type. Another letter I recall is an Italian or Spanish lad who writes to his ma asking for another knitted woolly sweater she made for him because the local weather is bloody awful. Another one asks for more beer from the quartermaster. Another is a woman sending an invite to a wedding/shindig. Most appear to have been written by the local literate bloke/scribe and signed by the sender. Pity we don't have the replies.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The Greek steam engine was a toy not practical for power. To get to the first practical steam engine you needed good metallurgy. It took a lot of engineering to get a steam turbine more powerful than piston steam engines.

They also had no need because they had slaves to do all the heavy work.

Wibbs wrote: »

Kidney infection? Something like that anyway

Kinda

In those days it was rude to leave the table before your host. So Tycho didn't go to the little boys room which eventually lead to a burst bladder

Wibbs wrote: »

The story of how sun came to seen as the centre of the solar system is an interesting one.

The Ancient Greeks, well a couple of them and some Arabs thrown in had mused on it, but it didn't really take. Certainly not in Europe. The Christian Church had relied on Aristotle's(and some biblical) reality on the matter and held that the Earth was the centre of things. Makes sense. I mean it sounds daft now, but if you didn't know any different the Earth being the centre of things is backed up by most general observation. What you know shapes reality.

Anyway this priest scientist, by the name of Copernicus on the back of the whole information revolution of the printed book where people were sharing theories like crazy has another look and decides that hang on, the Sun is the centre of things. And contrary to popular belief the Catholic Church were all for it. The dedication of his book is to the pope of the time and is printed by church printers. For a start his calculations helped them with setting the religious calendar which was of utmost import. Plus it was kept among themselves and other learned types, so nothing to rattle the great unwashed or their beliefs, so be grand.

Then along comes Galileo and with his new fangled telescope that he got from the Ducth (and improved) does more looking and thinking and adds to and solidifies the theory. Generally keeps it to himself and other learned types and again contrary to popular belief the Church doesn't really care. Cool and the gang. Until he receives a letter from the wife of some local bigwig prince who asks the question that shouldn't be asked. Namely; Yo G, the bible says the Earth stood still. Does this mean the bible is wrong? Galileo then goes and answers the question that shouldn't be asked and most certainly shouldn't be answered and says "yep, it means that part is wrong".

This letter makes its way to some local bishop and then to Rome and a collective "ah crap" is heard. And still the Church says, "jaysus Ted, what were you thinking, let's chill the hell out and say nothing more, it'll rattle the peasants. We'll release the info ourselves over time and we're all grand. Cool?". Galileo gets a bee in his bonnet and being in possession of more ego than sense(which was some trick for him) replies "ah feck off, I'll publish and bedamned". That's when the Church put him under house arrest. And took Copernicus' book off the library shelves. In public anyway...

This led to other scientists getting the fear about what the Church might do to them if they wanted to publish, so a load of them hotfooted it to northern Protestant Europe where they continued observations and conclusions from same. As did local guys in those areas. Including one lad named Kepler. He looked at all the data that had been gathered and worked out things like the planets moved in elliptical orbits and all sorts of other cool stuff. Then we had Newton who came up with a grand theory of everything.

And another lad by the name of Halley. He made all sorts of predictions including the comet that bears his name and what year it would come back. Meanwhile back in Catholic Europe the Jesuits had kept all the "secret" books in play and kept up correspondence with their northern Protestant scientists mates.

They looked at Halley's prediction and with Newtons new theory of gravity and all the other cool stuff reckoned that because of the position of Jupiter and its gravity Halley's Comet would be late by a year. And they were right. And the year it came back was the very same year our friend Copernicus' book was taken off the blacklist and officially went back on the Vatican's library shelves.

There hasn't been a time since antiquity when people believed the earth was flat. All the western world knew it thanks to the Greeks and then the Romans who passed it on. Aristotle said it was a sphere. It's been recorded in the early middle ages in christian lands. There was a small group of Christians in Syria who believed it was flat but that was it.

The myth that people thought the earth was flat came from relatively modern protestants in the US who wanted to show that the Catholic church was wrong.

So religion is kinda responsible. But it was picked up by scientists who wanted to promote science and discredit all Christianity. And now it's the truth (kinda)

As for Heliocentric theory, That theory was accepted all across the Islamic world and as far as India.

And I saw something about hieroglyphs earlier. Has it been mentioned yet about the Rosetta stone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Grayson wrote: »

They also had no need because they had slaves to do all the heavy work.

Which is why there wasn't a telephone answering machine until nearly a century after phone was invented. People had butlers.

IIRC the can opener wasn't invented until 60-80 year after the can.

Wibbs wrote: »

I genuinely tend to avoid google, unless I'm looking for new stuff to me. I figure I'll get mind lazy if I rely on the interwebs too much. How our memories operate and have operated over time intrigues me. It also intrigued different famous folks in history. IIRC Plato was dubious about writing things down. Figuring that once a debate was written it tended to concrete an idea against further debate. Look how long Aristotle's reality held sway. That was before mass dessimination of the word and minds and ideas via printing of course. Julius Caesar in his dairy(and they're worth a read) noted the "Celtic" bards and their prodigious knowledge and memories would be lost if they became literate. Why remember if you have an external memory at one's disposal? With the coming of the electronic Information Age that's more in play than ever before. We have many WikiExperts at large. Not necessarily* a bad thing of course. Since the Age of Printing information has flowed so fast and changes so quickly and ever moreso today, that we need that external memory. Even when those things we look up and know are almost certainly already out of date, somewhere.

All well and good, but the stuff to be remembered HAS to get into your brain, one way or another. If you didn't learn it in school or college or you didn't study it on your own accord, you have to get the information from somewhere else, if you want to learn it.

Grayson wrote: »

They also had no need because they had slaves to do all the heavy work.

A morality that Aristotle struggled with and twisted himself in knots trying to resolve. He surely knew it was exploitative and immoral, but... Its no coincidence that the emancipation of the slaves in America came along with the age of steam. A steam engine can do the work of many slaves and far more cheaply. Interestingly in later Rome, most doctors were Greeks and either slaves or freed slaves or sons of slaves. And were usually mistrusted as quacks and chancers. It was a trade and a trade viewed with suspicion, rather than the exalted profession it became. And that came quite late in Western Europe. The red and white barber's pole was originally representative of hair cutting and tooth pulling and surgery and general application of leeches to "balance the humours".

The notion of the four humours(phlegm, dark bile, pale bile, blood) comes from way back. The Egyptians thought it and it was codified by our old mates the Greeks and held sway in Europe and in the Arab lands(who were at one time more observational in approach) for a long time. If one type of humour imbalance was observed, that meant bloodletting. Leeches were a go to, as were various gnarly and horrifying mechanical devices that would release the blood "humour" from the patient's body and so restore balance. Usually by killing the patient and you can't get more balanced than that. Any fever encountered made bloodletting a given. So that was a lot of the time. Bad Tooth? Leeches. Plague? Leeches.

Some words that come down to us today(albeit rarely enough in most people's discourse) reflect this notion. Melancholia, an old word for depression translates as "dark bile". "Bilious" another example. "Phlegmatic" yet another.

New Home wrote: »

All well and good, but the stuff to be remembered HAS to get into your brain, one way or another. If you didn't learn it in school or college or you didn't study it on your own accord, you have to get the information from somewhere else, if you want to learn it.

Oh very true NH. TBH I'm kinda fighting with myself.

Well my schooling while of a quality beyond my natural talents often fell on deaf ears and my results generally followed that deafness and I never attended college, so mostly self taught. Luckily I have been lucky to find and seek out and have people who still to this day challenge me. TBH I fcuking love being wrong. It means I might be right down the line, or at least more informed with better counsel. The interwebs is or can be a great teacher in that mix.

Wibbs wrote: »

Some words that come down to us today(albeit rarely enough in most people's discourse) reflect this notion. Melancholia, an old word for depression translates as "dark bile". "Bilious" another example. "Phlegmatic" yet another.

Another one would be the word for the disease "Cholera". Greek(ish) for "bile".

Grayson wrote: »

There hasn't been a time since antiquity when people believed the earth was flat. All the western world knew it thanks to the Greeks and then the Romans who passed it on. Aristotle said it was a sphere. It's been recorded in the early middle ages in christian lands. There was a small group of Christians in Syria who believed it was flat but that was it.

True dat. Flat earthers were a tiny minority from the classical world onwards.

As for Heliocentric theory, That theory was accepted all across the Islamic world and as far as India.

It had been considered, yes, but accepted, not so much. Just like in the wider classical world. The Islamic world had bought into the mainstream Greek science notions wholesale. Notions which suggested that the Earth was the centre of things surrounded by crystal spheres upon which the planets were hung. This is actually in the Quran itself as a blueprint for the heavens and reality.

Esel

Wibbs wrote: »

I fcuking love being wrong. It means I might be right down the line, or at least more informed with better counsel. The interwebs is or can be a great teacher in that mix.

"increased the tolerances" a few posts up?

Wibbs wrote: »

Another one would be the word for the disease "Cholera". Greek(ish) for "bile".

And "choleric", too.

Thargor

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Roll the clock back to 3,750 years ago and Nanni was sending a letter to Ea-Nasir complaining about the quality of the copper he'd bought and the rudely his servants were treated.

You can see that in the British museum, he sounds so outraged, he was also having to send his runners back and forth through enemy territory in the city trying to sort out the order, its more impressive than the Rosetta stone in the same room imo, it seems more real. Its also amazingly well made for a quick note scratched in clay:

Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”
What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas.
How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.
Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.

FanadMan

Thargor wrote: »

You can see that in the British museum, he sounds so outraged, he was also having to send his runners back and forth through enemy territory in the city trying to sort out the order, its more impressive than the Rosetta stone in the same room imo, it seems more real. Its also amazingly well made for a quick note scratched in clay:

This was just mentioned on QI a few secs ago! You must be psychic Thargor

Thargor

Everybody should see the British Museum if they haven't already been, its free and you can spend days in there, there's something like that in every room, it goes on forever.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Which is why there wasn't a telephone answering machine until nearly a century after phone was invented. People had butlers.

IIRC the can opener wasn't invented until 60-80 year after the can.

I saw an article which mentioned that the first cans were made out of glass. I thought, aren't they just jars then?

Wibbs wrote: »

A morality that Aristotle struggled with and twisted himself in knots trying to resolve. He surely knew it was exploitative and immoral, but...

Aristotle decided that it was right to have slaves because some people were naturally good at taking orders and bad at thinking.

He did however not support Plato's idea that all women should be shared communally.

Truly enlightened people.