Also Schliemann plowed right through the levels that might actually be what he was looking for because he only stopped digging when he finally found some golden bling.
Well a hundred years cant be a VERY short time for a book how many five hundred years old books are there kicking around not like a shitload I can't imagine you've got to be in the old bastard book club by the time you make it to five hundred I should think
Books were mass-produced in great quantities since the 18 hundreds. Gotta be older than that, or small-run first printings of a famous book, for the book to be worth anything.
Love that they kept looking for the historical site of a fictional city
Like explorers looking for Atlantis, or the kingdom of Prester John
troy was a realass city and was attested to in work other than the illiad
the exact location and whether the war happened were questionable
To be fair, the specific name Troy is one used in writings that would be referential to the Iliad. There isn't like another source for that name.
That being said, there are historical records from the Hittites that attest to a city on the Anatolian coast that has a suspiciously similar name, Wilusa. Besides Troy, Homer also occasionally refers to the land of Troy as the Illos, so there is some argument that the Greeks took the name Wilusa and changed it to Troy and Illos respectively as Wilusa would be pretty phonetically foreign and hard to parse to ancient greek ears. As for the site now labelled as Troy, there is definitive evidence that it did have contact with the ancient Greeks and there is a sizable amount of evidence that at its most prosperous point it was sacked.
Still doesn't prove it's Troy, or that the Illiad was in fact based off some historical fact. It's just lots of circumstantial evidence. Proving that something happened fifty years ago can be hard, proving something happened four thousand years ago is usually impossible unless you get lucky.
Gundi on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
alexander conquered the region specifically because he loved achilles
it was later an early church bishopric!
the city itself was rebuilt like 10-11 times and was occupied with hellensitic greeks after the dark age(some of the sea peoples might've been achean greeks)
shit had a wild history, and it's loss from common knowledge took place after the eastern empire
+5
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
this is interesting as hell. people living in the great lakes area were working copper at least 8500 years ago. this pushes back the previously-held dating by like two thousand years, which means this culture was making stuff out of copper at least as early as anyone anywhere else in the world. these folks were prolific about making copper tools for thousands of years until they stopped pretty suddenly, for reasons that aren't really clear. there's a paper linked in the article where some researchers recreated a bunch of the old culture's copper tools and tested them, coming to the conclusion that they're not massively more effective than stone tools, also i suspect that stone tools requiring way less specialized labor and much simpler supply chain type stuff comes into play
it's endlessly cool how frequently we think we have some milestone nailed down pretty solidly to a particular time, and then new shit comes to light and it turns out no, actually humans have been doing this for way longer than we previously thought
It's a bit spooky how these milestones appear globally around the same time.
It does help when "around the same time" means "plus/minus 500 years".
Closer to modern day those years difference counts for a lot more.
Considering we've been working with anatomically modern brains for around 300,000 years, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that some cultures flirted with agriculture or metallurgy way earlier, and then either died out or just quit doing it the same way these folks did. Especially since populations tend to be densest near the ocean, and so a whole bunch of the most popular settlement spots for the last several ice ages are now miles offshore.
It's a bit spooky how these milestones appear globally around the same time.
the one that really gets me is smelting iron
it is not intuitive the same way copper smelting is. there's extremely little native iron on earth because it oxidizes so easily, so there isn't like an example of the metal ready-made for people thousands of years ago to be able to point to and say "okay, if we melt this particular type of rock it will produce a useful material." it's also really hard to physically do! you need to build a furnace and run it at very high temperatures for hours at a time, and even when that's done you don't have like an ingot of pure iron, it's still a slaggy mess that you have to keep heating and consolidating and heating and consolidating and you get the idea
the bloomery process for smelting iron was invented a handful of times over like a thousand years and each invention was probably independent of the others. it's a good reminder that people thousands of years ago (or for that matter people now that live without a lot of technology) weren't stupid, they just didn't have the same access to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that we do
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
It's a bit spooky how these milestones appear globally around the same time.
the one that really gets me is smelting iron
it is not intuitive the same way copper smelting is. there's extremely little native iron on earth because it oxidizes so easily, so there isn't like an example of the metal ready-made for people thousands of years ago to be able to point to and say "okay, if we melt this particular type of rock it will produce a useful material." it's also really hard to physically do! you need to build a furnace and run it at very high temperatures for hours at a time, and even when that's done you don't have like an ingot of pure iron, it's still a slaggy mess that you have to keep heating and consolidating and heating and consolidating and you get the idea
the bloomery process for smelting iron was invented a handful of times over like a thousand years and each invention was probably independent of the others. it's a good reminder that people thousands of years ago (or for that matter people now that live without a lot of technology) weren't stupid, they just didn't have the same access to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that we do
smelting bronze is less intuitive
you have to get copper, which largely is found on cyprus, and tin which is largely found in southern afganistan or cornwall
and them mix them in a roughly 9:1 ratio otherwise it will be too soft or too brittle
you can use arsenic instead of tin if you're feeling spicy and also don't mind dying probably
iron is melt a bunch of rocks you find all over the place and some goop falls out
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
if they're so smart how come they all died???
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Ancient aliens theories are all wicked racist.
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
if they're so smart how come they all died???
I always assume most ancient civilizations were just too good at fuckin' and fucked until they eventually turned into an entirely different civilization.
It's why society is collapsing now. We've all forgotten how to fuck good.
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
if they're so smart how come they all died???
I always assume most ancient civilizations were just too good at fuckin' and fucked until they eventually turned into an entirely different civilization.
It's why society is collapsing now. We've all forgotten how to fuck good.
Case in point
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
2008, eh? The same year Bitcoin was invented?
I've been saying it for years, boys. Cryptocurrency is a cockblocker.
It's a bit spooky how these milestones appear globally around the same time.
the one that really gets me is smelting iron
it is not intuitive the same way copper smelting is. there's extremely little native iron on earth because it oxidizes so easily, so there isn't like an example of the metal ready-made for people thousands of years ago to be able to point to and say "okay, if we melt this particular type of rock it will produce a useful material." it's also really hard to physically do! you need to build a furnace and run it at very high temperatures for hours at a time, and even when that's done you don't have like an ingot of pure iron, it's still a slaggy mess that you have to keep heating and consolidating and heating and consolidating and you get the idea
the bloomery process for smelting iron was invented a handful of times over like a thousand years and each invention was probably independent of the others. it's a good reminder that people thousands of years ago (or for that matter people now that live without a lot of technology) weren't stupid, they just didn't have the same access to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that we do
smelting bronze is less intuitive
you have to get copper, which largely is found on cyprus, and tin which is largely found in southern afganistan or cornwall
and them mix them in a roughly 9:1 ratio otherwise it will be too soft or too brittle
you can use arsenic instead of tin if you're feeling spicy and also don't mind dying probably
iron is melt a bunch of rocks you find all over the place and some goop falls out
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
if they're so smart how come they all died???
a culture making bronze when it already knows about copper is absolutely more intuitive than smelting iron. making bloomery iron is a complex difficult process that if you don't do all the steps you don't get anything useful at all. once you've built a furnace that can melt the rocks (which, smelting iron takes much higher temperatures than any other metal ancient folks worked with, and even then the iron never fully liquefies in the processes we're talking about) you have to know which goop is the stuff you're working with and which is the garbage, you have to spend hours welding a bloom together into something that actually resembles metal and then more hours cutting and folding the billet to homogenize the slag that's still in there as much as possible. i've done both myself on a very small scale, making iron from rocks is much harder and less intuitive than making any given copper alloy from rocks
now bronze is a lot more complex logistically. copper is reasonably common all over the place but tin is not, and it makes sense that european cultures kept using bronze to make tools until the bronze age collapse caused trade routes to break down which disrupted tin supply in places where there weren't local deposits. there's not a huge difference in harness/durability between coarse wrought iron and bronze and the iron is insanely more labor intensive to produce, so there wasn't much reason to make the switch early on without some external thing to encourage it
September 10 – The proton beam is circulated for the first time in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, located at CERN, near Geneva, under the Franco-Swiss border.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
The truth, of course, is that everyone under 30 has two jobs and a side hustle because we never really fixed the economy after the Great Recession. The stock market is back up, but only because the rich people finally managed to destroy the concept of careerism and replaced it with the gig economy. Young people who didn't inherit are simply too tired to bone, and where would they find the time?
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
i still want a television show where a dude from mexico and a dude from egypt go all over europe and invent theories about how those backward europeans couldn't have built all those cathedrals and castles on their own, they had to have gotten help from aliens
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
if they're so smart how come they all died???
I always assume most ancient civilizations were just too good at fuckin' and fucked until they eventually turned into an entirely different civilization.
It's why society is collapsing now. We've all forgotten how to fuck good.
I distinctly remember an Egyptology show with Doctor Zahi Hawass and they were in a pyramid and this dumb white lady was like "man and to think this could've been built by aliens."
The look he gave her was withering. I felt it through the TV. He broke her soul. He just said like "no. Why would you say that? Don't ever say that again."
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
i still want a television show where a dude from mexico and a dude from egypt go all over europe and invent theories about how those backward europeans couldn't have built all those cathedrals and castles on their own, they had to have gotten help from aliens
The gig economy is exactly the same as turning up to the docks each day, hoping you’ll get picked for a job shovelling coal or unloading cargo for the day
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
i still want a television show where a dude from mexico and a dude from egypt go all over europe and invent theories about how those backward europeans couldn't have built all those cathedrals and castles on their own, they had to have gotten help from aliens
I had a professor tell our class that joke once.
But for real, you master interstellar travel and you big a big pile of rocks? For real?
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
i still want a television show where a dude from mexico and a dude from egypt go all over europe and invent theories about how those backward europeans couldn't have built all those cathedrals and castles on their own, they had to have gotten help from aliens
I had a professor tell our class that joke once.
But for real, you master interstellar travel and you big a big pile of rocks? For real?
yeah you could have bigged a big anything else, there's all kinds of bigs to big out there
Like, big if, impossible if, but if aliens did build something like the pyramids on earth it was probably like, teenagers trying to prank us.
The idea that aliens built the pyramids, besides being racist towards the original builders, also shows a big humanity bias is that it assumes out species is worth contacting if you are an international civilization.
Posts
He was a troyhard?
Books were mass-produced in great quantities since the 18 hundreds. Gotta be older than that, or small-run first printings of a famous book, for the book to be worth anything.
troy was a realass city and was attested to in work other than the illiad
the exact location and whether the war happened were questionable
The Dead Sea has more pages than grrm
Given the nature of the world present and past, I am 99% certain that a war of some kind happened there, if not exactly as described in legend.
To be fair, the specific name Troy is one used in writings that would be referential to the Iliad. There isn't like another source for that name.
That being said, there are historical records from the Hittites that attest to a city on the Anatolian coast that has a suspiciously similar name, Wilusa. Besides Troy, Homer also occasionally refers to the land of Troy as the Illos, so there is some argument that the Greeks took the name Wilusa and changed it to Troy and Illos respectively as Wilusa would be pretty phonetically foreign and hard to parse to ancient greek ears. As for the site now labelled as Troy, there is definitive evidence that it did have contact with the ancient Greeks and there is a sizable amount of evidence that at its most prosperous point it was sacked.
Still doesn't prove it's Troy, or that the Illiad was in fact based off some historical fact. It's just lots of circumstantial evidence. Proving that something happened fifty years ago can be hard, proving something happened four thousand years ago is usually impossible unless you get lucky.
it was later an early church bishopric!
the city itself was rebuilt like 10-11 times and was occupied with hellensitic greeks after the dark age(some of the sea peoples might've been achean greeks)
shit had a wild history, and it's loss from common knowledge took place after the eastern empire
spoiler alert: it's just homestuck
this is interesting as hell. people living in the great lakes area were working copper at least 8500 years ago. this pushes back the previously-held dating by like two thousand years, which means this culture was making stuff out of copper at least as early as anyone anywhere else in the world. these folks were prolific about making copper tools for thousands of years until they stopped pretty suddenly, for reasons that aren't really clear. there's a paper linked in the article where some researchers recreated a bunch of the old culture's copper tools and tested them, coming to the conclusion that they're not massively more effective than stone tools, also i suspect that stone tools requiring way less specialized labor and much simpler supply chain type stuff comes into play
it's endlessly cool how frequently we think we have some milestone nailed down pretty solidly to a particular time, and then new shit comes to light and it turns out no, actually humans have been doing this for way longer than we previously thought
hitting hot metal with hammers
It does help when "around the same time" means "plus/minus 500 years".
Closer to modern day those years difference counts for a lot more.
Considering we've been working with anatomically modern brains for around 300,000 years, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that some cultures flirted with agriculture or metallurgy way earlier, and then either died out or just quit doing it the same way these folks did. Especially since populations tend to be densest near the ocean, and so a whole bunch of the most popular settlement spots for the last several ice ages are now miles offshore.
the one that really gets me is smelting iron
it is not intuitive the same way copper smelting is. there's extremely little native iron on earth because it oxidizes so easily, so there isn't like an example of the metal ready-made for people thousands of years ago to be able to point to and say "okay, if we melt this particular type of rock it will produce a useful material." it's also really hard to physically do! you need to build a furnace and run it at very high temperatures for hours at a time, and even when that's done you don't have like an ingot of pure iron, it's still a slaggy mess that you have to keep heating and consolidating and heating and consolidating and you get the idea
the bloomery process for smelting iron was invented a handful of times over like a thousand years and each invention was probably independent of the others. it's a good reminder that people thousands of years ago (or for that matter people now that live without a lot of technology) weren't stupid, they just didn't have the same access to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that we do
hitting hot metal with hammers
Folks was smart as hell they just utilized their knowledge in different ways. You could transplant somebody from ancient Mesopotamia and probably have them using smartphones and asking for wifi passwords at Starbucks in a fairly short amount of time.
Speaking of let me pitch you guys my new sitcom spec script
you have to get copper, which largely is found on cyprus, and tin which is largely found in southern afganistan or cornwall
and them mix them in a roughly 9:1 ratio otherwise it will be too soft or too brittle
you can use arsenic instead of tin if you're feeling spicy and also don't mind dying probably
iron is melt a bunch of rocks you find all over the place and some goop falls out if they're so smart how come they all died???
Except for the origins of corn. I don't think it takes anything away from neolithic Mesoamericans to posit that domesticating corn was a four-thousand-year prank by a bunch of really mean aliens. That was a bullshit crop for so long, there was no reason for people to be born, cultivate bullshit corn with like ten angry little kernels on what would someday be a cob and die thinking "Yes, I did good work and hopefully my grandson will see the day when a cultivar produces an eleventh angry little kernel, I think I made some real progress there, the corn god will be super psyched."
I always assume most ancient civilizations were just too good at fuckin' and fucked until they eventually turned into an entirely different civilization.
It's why society is collapsing now. We've all forgotten how to fuck good.
Case in point
I've been saying it for years, boys. Cryptocurrency is a cockblocker.
a culture making bronze when it already knows about copper is absolutely more intuitive than smelting iron. making bloomery iron is a complex difficult process that if you don't do all the steps you don't get anything useful at all. once you've built a furnace that can melt the rocks (which, smelting iron takes much higher temperatures than any other metal ancient folks worked with, and even then the iron never fully liquefies in the processes we're talking about) you have to know which goop is the stuff you're working with and which is the garbage, you have to spend hours welding a bloom together into something that actually resembles metal and then more hours cutting and folding the billet to homogenize the slag that's still in there as much as possible. i've done both myself on a very small scale, making iron from rocks is much harder and less intuitive than making any given copper alloy from rocks
now bronze is a lot more complex logistically. copper is reasonably common all over the place but tin is not, and it makes sense that european cultures kept using bronze to make tools until the bronze age collapse caused trade routes to break down which disrupted tin supply in places where there weren't local deposits. there's not a huge difference in harness/durability between coarse wrought iron and bronze and the iron is insanely more labor intensive to produce, so there wasn't much reason to make the switch early on without some external thing to encourage it
hitting hot metal with hammers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008
Personally, I'm blaming
i still want a television show where a dude from mexico and a dude from egypt go all over europe and invent theories about how those backward europeans couldn't have built all those cathedrals and castles on their own, they had to have gotten help from aliens
hitting hot metal with hammers
Speak for yourself
The look he gave her was withering. I felt it through the TV. He broke her soul. He just said like "no. Why would you say that? Don't ever say that again."
Absolutely devastating.
aliens
statue of liberty?
aliens
Big Ben?
Ancient Chinese merchants
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
i like this channel
I had a professor tell our class that joke once.
But for real, you master interstellar travel and you big a big pile of rocks? For real?
yeah you could have bigged a big anything else, there's all kinds of bigs to big out there
The idea that aliens built the pyramids, besides being racist towards the original builders, also shows a big humanity bias is that it assumes out species is worth contacting if you are an international civilization.
Weren't not.