41–50 of 150 posts
That is interesting and from a very layman’s understanding it would be unexpected. I’m just a casual fan of history and have listened to a lot of lectures for Mediterranean history around bronze age, and my takeaway was that the consensus among Egyptologists was that ancient Egyptians never got very good at navigation & seamanship because they didn’t have to be. They had wind to go upstream on the Nile and current to…
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As for one, at least, if the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew the world was spherical (as they did, and had an approximate measure of its dimension), this could be easily predicted and might make part of whatever speculative discussion they had that was the equivalence of HN or general interested internerdery here. The second is harder to find an excuse for. (O/T) Of interest to me is something I learned from HN - h…
Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth pretty well in 00240 BCE. Aristotle claimed it was round around 00350 BCE, and might have had a correct value, but uncertainty about units of measurement means his error could have been as large as a factor of 2, and the roundness of the earth was still a matter of debate at the time. Herodotus died around 00425 BCE and probably wrote closer to 00435 BCE. They were al…
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I’m not convinced they did. Not only is this an account by a notorious “liar” (as herodotus is known) but the Egyptians were notoriously bad at sailing due to being spoiled by the Nile. When they travelled in the Red Sea they famously hugged the coast stopping at sundown and they hardly ever went far out on the Mediterranean.
well, this trip sounds way more plausible than Troy/Iliad story. And Troy was discovered based on folk tales more or less. So who knows, may be Egyptians did it. ps: for Russian speaking crowd: there is a YA book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_of_Foam which is a fiction version of would-be such a trip.
This was very risky, as they had no idea about climate in new places. But according to what we know was entirely possible along African coast.
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…
Up until recently I did not know there was a way out from the Great Lakes into the ocean that does not involve going up North all the way through St. Lawrence. You can go through the Welland canal and shortcuts and end up going down South.
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Why not? The Phoenicians had rowers and could just take down their sails. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme they also beached their boats at night so they must have been quite comfortable traveling over shallows.
I think beaching the boats at night and having large rowing crews makes it less likely that they could have circumnavigated Africa. You'd double the amount of time it would take, 6x the amount of food and water needed, and infinitely increase the chance of a hostile encounter. Not saying it couldn't be done, but the logistics boggle the mind.
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…
Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include the conventional full stop immediately after the last character of the sentence.
what you say is so obvious, I'd prefer that you read your comment first as representing the generally held wisdom I'm arguing against, and then interpret my comment as a riposte to that. My point was that, and this applies to printed books also, what breaks up flow for me is to go searching for footnotes which by their nature are any place but handy. I'm a detail oriented person, and I want the illumination that extra detailed footnotes provide, and it doesn't distract me at all from what I'm reading--and especially not distracting with regard to a highlighted link
your comment about the missing full stop points out exactly what I'm talking about: you give primacy to the rules of punctuation over the interesting thoughts being conveyed, the unique, human, creative part. I'll bet you just love C's semicolons? (actually, I do love C's semicolons, because I speak C, but I use it as an example because the average person finds them infuriating... and in any case, I actually LOVE when inserting an URL into text frees me from having to add a full stop someplace, whose purpose adds nothing to the information, it's simply a notional convenience to separate one notion from another) and I threw in an em-dash up there to show that I also find emdashes--like this--much less distracting than parentheses (parentheses really make the aside take over your train of thought) in terms of figuring out where you are in the original paragraph
(omg, downvotes for the most interesting thing you've read all day, something that points out a number of things you never thought of before? pioneers always die of arrows in the back!)
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…
Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include the conventional full stop immediately after the last character of the sentence.
I find it useful to explain some concept that most readers probably know, to bulletproof ("yes, I'm well aware there are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't important to the general point, and references. (Of course, if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)
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…
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 that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book:
5000BCE * first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam
2000BCE * glass produced in south west asia * development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china
600BCE * first production of cast iron in china * iron working in west Africa
150CE * First use of paper in china * compass in use in china
600CE * 1200 mile long canal built in china * iron cables for suspension bridges in china * horse collar used in china * paper used in china and korea
750CE * first wood block printing in China
1000CE * vikings reach north America * first gunpowder weapons in china * paper money in china * horse collar used in europe
1200CE * multi-,colour printing in china * European ships adopt Chinese stern-rudder and compass
...