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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

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Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#131

Post by koheripbal »

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…

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.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#132

Post by koheripbal »

w0de0 wrote: post #66
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'm trying to visualize the sailing conditions the Phoenicians would have faced at Bojador - and not really succeeding, because I don't know enough about their vessels. But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the north, pr…

I agree - I don't think it's as big of a challenge as the above commenter thinks.

Phoenician boats would have been significantly shallower drafts, and more importantly, they would have been sailing with the wind and current, not against it, since they were coming north at that point, not going south.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#133

Post by datameta »

logicx24 wrote: post #108
tombh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory: I love Hacker News Not only am I interested to hear that "hot boxing" is an ancient practice, but also the sense of immediacy that I now have with ancient Persia over our shared etymology of kanab .

I love history for that. Just knowing about the past gives me a feeling of connection to places I've never been to or times I'll never get to witness. As an aside, the Scythians were not in what we'd today consider Persia (Iran). They originated around the north coast of the Black Sea, and extended east and southeast from there along the Eurasian steppe.

It truly is fascinating to follow the flow of cultures through time - sometimes coexisting, sometimes crashing against one another, yet other times melting together.

For a look at the least assimilated remaining descendants of Scythians (who were largely absorbed by early Slavs by the early middle ages) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#134

Post by singularity2001 »

w0de0 wrote: post #124
benbreen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sc…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort, 18 Febr. 2007:

A word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually in connection with trade, so that it becomes impossible to establish its original etymology, or even its original language.

Interestingly even back in Egyptian times there was a corroded version with H instead of C: 𓎛 𓆰 𓈖 | H.n | cannabis

(unless 𓎛 was closer to C than to H)

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#135

Post by divbzero »

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.

Perhaps a HN comment circa year 04000 CE will read: “Circumnavigating the moon is actually quite easy to do. If you’re a qualified astronaut and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft spacecraft — no navigation equipment needed.”

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#136

Post by divbzero »

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 potential of a large gap between lunar expeditions is an interesting thought experiment. What course of future events could make it so we don’t return to the Moon for another 1,000+ years?

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#137

Post by singularity2001 »

estaseuropano wrote: post #50
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'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…

   >  development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china
correction: horses and chariots where introduced to china, not developed there (as was likely early metallurgy)

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#138

Post by anigbrowl »

simonh wrote: post #127
anigbrowl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Not if you're just going to be sarcastic. Which Chinese philosophies are you familiar with?

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#139

Post by cryptonector »

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.

I mean, we do too, we just call them 2D projections, but they are "flat earth models" :^)

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#140

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Never forget the Antikythera mechanism!
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