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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

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Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#121

Post by ppsreejith »

sthnblllII wrote: post #58
estaseuropano wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a large Eurasian focus (due to the availability of sources, not bias). He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically played no role whatsoever. A few examples t…

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

In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia.

Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml

Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the first practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efficient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The figure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#122

Post by kilroy123 »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #60
foreigner wrote: post #28

If you haven't read it I highly recommend The History. Herodotus can be very entertaining. He pretty clearly lays out things he personally saw, things he heard from firsthand accounts, and things he heard secondhand. It's fun to see how things get more fanciful the farther you get away from the Mediterranean he knew. One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people…

Wait the Ethiopians had coffee in 400BCE?

Maybe... That's where coffee is originally from. I find it ironic humans and coffee come from the same place.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#123

Post by tomasdore »

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…

I believe the account has them sailing the other way: down the Red Sea. They pass Bojador eventually, but in the opposite direction, which would be quite different, I would think (for encountering winds, etc).

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#124

Post by w0de0 »

benbreen wrote: post #78
pushswap wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herodotus isn't considered reliable at all by historians in any of his writings whether his topic is close geographically or not. Thucydides is a far better option , being at the beginning of the record for the continuous record of reliable historical writing.

I'm a historian and I recently cited Herodotus in one of my forthcoming papers. Is he reliable? We certainly can't assume so. But the same goes for Thucydides and every other source from the ancient world. It's all about triangulating between different sources rather than relying on any one account. In my case, Herodotus was describing a Scythian practice (the use of cannabis) that we've been able to corroborate, in…

Are you sure about that etymology?

“Reading the literature on the word for ‘Cannabis’ in the languages of Eurasia soon puts one in mind of what one is told frequently happens when the authorities conduct a raid to confiscate Cannabis and attempt to identify to whom it belongs: everyone involved says it belongs to someone else, generally someone conveniently not present at the moment.” [0] Some dictionaries claim a Scythian origin.

0 - Miller, R. A.: Korean Evidence for Three Eurasian-Altaic Wanderwörter Scenarios, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 51/3: 296.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#125

Post by nkoren »

divbzero wrote: post #114
mabbo wrote: post #61

> These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. It's 600BC. The idea that the world is a sphere isn't accepted yet. Herodotus explicitly says he doesn't believe what these sailors said- that the sun was to the north. Yet we know that if a sailor…

> 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 Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.

I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#126

Post by taejo »

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…

> 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

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

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#127

Post by simonh »

anigbrowl wrote: post #97
c06n wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear of destruction of the empire.

Might want to read some more Chinese philosophy before drawing such conclusions.

Please, tell me about this Chinese philosophy of "freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men".

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#128

Post by tgb »

slacktide wrote: post #110
tgb wrote: post #2

The ancient Egyptian (or Persians?) built a Suez canal predecessor? Incredible. Is it a tourist attraction? And imagine building it only to realize that the surface height of the sea and the Nile don't match. Oops! Also I like that the parts of the circumnavigation tale that Herotodus thought unbelievable (sun on the "wrong" side) actually now make it more clearly true and not just another of Herotodus's exaggeration…

Um, there are no locks on the current modern Suez canal. The difference in height between the Med and the Red is only 28 feet. The resulting current is negligible and seasonal. Oops!

Wikipedia says that Senusret III specifically stopped building the canal due to the height differences. Ptolemy II later had locks built. Though this was also a canal to the Nile not the Mediterranean and so they were concerned about the salt water mixing with the lower and Nile water. Maybe navigation wasn't a concern.

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

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#129

Post by restalis »

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…

"And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years."

These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting factor to any attempt. The fact that happened is an exception. Not until the odds improve and a strong enough incentive changes things. The incentive for Moon landing has been political. Once achieved, it dissipated, and there isn't much sense for it to be repeated until a new motivating factor will appear.

Addition: Diolkos, considering the cost and efficiency of how it could have been operated and maintained back in the antiquity, was clearly an artifact that could work only for short distances, where the gains were significant enough to justify it, and there was little sense for it to be constructed on the scale that rails were later constructed.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#130

Post by krapp »

restalis wrote: post #129
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…

"And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years." These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting fac…

There's a decent answer to the Fermi paradox in there somewhere.
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