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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

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Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#141

Post by cryptonector »

fsckboy wrote: post #24

I'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past Cape Bojador[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador Maybe if they had small enough boats to stick close to the shore and portage. Seafaring on the Mediterranean is simply a lot less complex than it is on the open ocean. The European sailors were not able to pass this point till the 1…

Herodotus gives us three important reasons to believe it happened: 1) he tells us that Africa is surrounded by water except at Sinai -- how would he know this if the trip hadn't happened? 2) he tells us the sailors saw the Sun to their North when South of the equator -- how would he know this if they hadn't at least gone that far?! (well, he could have posited it had he known the Earth is round, but then he'd probably have told us that too) 3) he tells us how long the voyage took and that the sailors had to grow their own food, which tells us how large Africa was and is (though I can't judge if three years was enough given their technology) -- how would he have known that Africa was that large?!

Three correct details (Africa mostly surrounded by waters, Africa straddling the equator, Africa being very large) that would have been hard to make up out of sheer fantasy. Especially (2).

Though the Egyptians almost certainly long had known by then that the Earth is round and it's possible that he made very educated guesses and told us a fantasy just cause, and pretended to not believe the bit about the Sun just to make his story more mythical to his contemporaries. But is that likely? Did he do a lot of that?

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#142

Post by cryptonector »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #65
sthnblllII wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe instead of Asia?

The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put…

There's... a lot of context to the industrial revolution.

First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.

Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.

Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.

That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.

Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#143

Post by mannykannot »

anigbrowl wrote: post #100
mannykannot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. So why did it start in Britain, rather than the United States or post-revolutionary France?

Short answer, sea power drove technological innovation (reliable clocks etc) and a global empire gave Britain access to more raw material for textiles than it could process by ahd, so there was a huge incentive for automation. Also, plenty of domestic iron ore and coal deposits allowed rapid scaling and positive feedback loops. Much of the IR centered on the north of England because they had good ports and the coal a…

I have no disagreement with the points you make, but they seem to tell a different story than one in which ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men were necessary. Watt's great invention came on the eve of Britain's attempt to suppress these dangerous ideas in its American colonies.

To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#144

Post by type0 »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #119
KingOfCoders wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Greek intelligentia believed in a spherical earth at least starting in the 5th century BC, Herodotus died 430/420 BC according to Wikipedia. "After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." -Wikipedia [0] Indeed the idea of a "flat earth" is a very recent idea [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_t…

The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc. But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth mo…

What is causing the most recent flat earth theory outbreaks all over the world? Could it be some environmental factor like pollutants, IQ is declining, bs online is increasing. Somehow it has to be the ultimate conspiracy theory measured by outlandishness.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#145

Post by kragen »

shigawire wrote: post #115
kragen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a large chasm between discovery and information that is widely known and accepted among the population There are even more extreme examples of this. The Moscow Papyrus is from 01850 BCE, and it explains how to calculate the area of a hemisphere from its diameter and how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid, so this information had already been discovered 3870 years ago—perhaps for many centuries.…

There is finite space in your brain. If you don't use it regularly it isn't odd to not retain it.

The phenomenon I'm talking about is not that people learned how to differentiate functions in college, then forgot, though that certainly does happen. I'm talking about people who never learned to differentiate at all, or never learned linear algebra, or never learned group theory, or never learned complexity theory. And not because they were busily learning something else and just hadn't gotten to group theory yet, but because at some point they just stopped learning things.

I'm not convinced of this finite-space theory. I mean, yes, in a physical sense, there's clearly finite space in your skull. But even the synaptic connections outnumber the bits in the textbooks for a B.A. by about four orders of magnitude, and the potential neural DNA methylation sites outnumber synaptic connections by another six orders of magnitude. So I don't think this intellectual stunting is accounted for by space limitations.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#146

Post by pyuser583 »

nkoren wrote: post #125
divbzero wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another voyage was necessary to vindicate the Phoenician claims. This trip was made in 1488, when Bartolomeus Diaz reached the Cape of Good Hope. That’s a full 2,000 years between the Egyptian circumnavigation and the European one.

The ancient world had far more capabilities than we often credit it with. The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit. Almost two and a half millennia between the first and the second. History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wrig…

Or a technology at the peak of its influence. Railroads were a huge thing, but peaked in terms of geopolitical influence in about 100 years. Same with modern highways, telephones, telegraph machines, etc.

Maybe bioengineering is the next big thing. That will probably peak in 100 years too.

Edit: which civilization are you attributing the voyage to? The Phoenicians were past their peak. The Egyptians were at their peak, but they basically were cutting a check.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#147

Post by pyuser583 »

koheripbal wrote: post #131
nkoren wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ancient world had far more capabilities than we often credit it with. The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit. Almost two and a half millennia between the first and the second. History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wrig…

Sailing around Africa is actually quite easy to do. If you're a qualified sailor and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft single sailed sailboat - no navigation equipment needed. I read a story of a 16 year old girl sailing around the entire planet - totally solo. Sailing is easy.

No it’s not! And the Cape of Good Hope had a terrible, terrible reputation for storms.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#148

Post by DemocracyFTW »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #119
KingOfCoders wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Greek intelligentia believed in a spherical earth at least starting in the 5th century BC, Herodotus died 430/420 BC according to Wikipedia. "After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." -Wikipedia [0] Indeed the idea of a "flat earth" is a very recent idea [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_t…

The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc. But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth mo…

> Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. More astonishingly, Chinese astronomers used a flat earth model until the 16th century.

This is hardly a proof these astronomers did believe their model pictured the shape of the Earth correctly. In fact, a kind of flat Earth model and a (horizontal coordinate system)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_coordinate_system) is used to this day in astronomy to demonstrate how the sky and the celestial bodies appear to an observer on the ground. This was exactly the purpose of earlier astronomers because from this knowledge they could deduce predictions about the seasons and eclipses (and, ok, lucky and unlucky days and so on). If you're ready to deal with a modicum of epicycles and are only interested in purely local ephemerides, the model is actually not so bad as a framework for calculations and the real improvement only comes with a heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, not so much from a spherical Earth.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#149

Post by KingOfCoders »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #119
KingOfCoders wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Greek intelligentia believed in a spherical earth at least starting in the 5th century BC, Herodotus died 430/420 BC according to Wikipedia. "After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." -Wikipedia [0] Indeed the idea of a "flat earth" is a very recent idea [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_t…

The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc. But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth mo…

Yes I know I gave talks on the topic for some time.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#150

Post by matt-attack »

cryptonector wrote: post #139
Sniffnoy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc. But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth mo…

> Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. I mean, we do too, we just call them 2D projections, but they are "flat earth models" :^)

Exactly this. A flat earth model can be extremely useful and convenient, and highly accurate depending on the use.
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