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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

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Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#71

Post by marci »

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…

> One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.

Maybe a thirdhand accounts of the flying snake (?)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/facts/fl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16aGSx9gFO4

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#72

Post by zamadatix »

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…

The article itself says they traded with Yemen and even that is south of the tropic of cancer. Also doesn't take the world being a certain shape for this to occur.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#73

Post by fsckboy »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #67
fsckboy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we're going off topic here, but i always feel like comments like yours assume that I'm a complete idiot and don't know anything and need to be told something obvious :) 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…

I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces your possible audience size.

I think have higher standards for obviousness than you.

My comment did not indicate that I don't understand footnotes, not here nor in books, that was something you read in. In fact, my comment indicated facility with the subject. A person unfamiliar with footnotes wouldn't even know to call them footnotes, and a person unfamiliar with how they are used on HN would not say "(a) I disagree with how they are used and (b) because links are highlighted to stand out they are not a distraction". What I just wrote there is obvious to me, why not to you?

nobody knows at the beginning of a comment whether later in the comment conventions are going to be bucked, and I highly doubt in a 4 line comment whether inline links or footnoted links are going to make a difference to audience size, i mean seriously!

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#74

Post by rsj_hn »

Title is a bit misleading. It was the Phoenicians who circumnavigated Africa, but the trip was sponsored by the Egyptians. Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations were not the same, and the Phoenicians were the master sailers/travellers of the mediterranean at that time, whereas the Egyptians were known for other accomplishments (such as growing wheat, central administration).

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#75

Post by kiba »

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…

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.

The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.

I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.

Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.

Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.

Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.

Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#76

Post by narag »

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…

'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past Cape Bojador

You assume the coast was the same two milennia before.

My hometown, a thousand km north, was in the coast two thousand years ago. Now it's 5 km inland.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#77

Post by gota »

fsckboy wrote: post #70
sthnblllII wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization, and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's what supported a growing population.

Isn't that largely offset by cultivating a lot of rice, that being so much more efficient as a crop?

What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's bonkers hight population across history?

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#78

Post by benbreen »

pushswap wrote: post #62
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…

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 its broad outlines, using archaeological finds, which to my mind makes it reliable enough to use.

If anyone's interested, this is a quote from the paper, which is a work in progress and not published yet: When Herodotus described the purification practices of Scythians following elite burials, he wrote of a ritual involving the construction of a tent-like enclosure of “wool mats.” At the center of this enclosure, the Scythians threw cannabis onto “red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it.” According to Herodotus, “the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath.” The term Herodotus used here – κάνναβις, or kánnabis – was a loan-word from Old Persian (kanab). From Greek, it made its way largely unchanged into Latin (cannabis) and from thence into the Romance languages and English." [Citing A. D. Godley, trans. The Histories of Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 4.74-6.]

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#79

Post by c06n »

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…

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.

Re: Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC

#80

Post by w0de0 »

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…

Also, Hanno the Navigator's journey is slightly better attested and includes traversing the cape north and south. Here is a commented translation of the account, from a Phoenician temple by way of Greek translators: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator...
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