gservitor:knight-of-vengeance: ngsb3: friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:obsidianthunderwolf:prismatic-
gservitor:knight-of-vengeance: ngsb3: friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:obsidianthunderwolf:prismatic-bell: jenniferrpovey: rhaenyra-snow: jenniferrpovey: prokopetz: cantyousayanythingnew: doublehamburgerjack: frantzfandom: deux-zero-deux: wtf-fun-factss: Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers? this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course. the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks. It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that. Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty. The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history. In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again. I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy. So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time. People invent the technology they need. They can even invent a technology, then not use it. The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.” Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering. So, why didn’t they use wheels? Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this: Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain. But that image shows us what they did have. That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did. Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what? You get real good at making bridges! And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river? You get real good at making boats. The technology a culture develops and uses is the technology they need. In Europe that was one suite of technology, and because white folk are so dang arrogant, we think that’s the superior means of development. It’s not, it’s just how technology develops in Europe. The Minoan civilisation in Greece, around 2,500 BCE, developed huge technological advancements, including fully operational water and sewage systems, complete with flushing toilets. This would be around 3,000 years before one was invented in England. Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria, the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq). A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost. The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost. The notion that technology can only advance is some white nonsense. That too. (Minoan Crete may have been part of the inspiration for Atlantis). This is also why Egyptians didn’t bother with the wheel* for like three thousand years. What fucking good are wheels when EVERYTHING IS SAND? But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region. Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them. Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution. *nominally. We have extant toys from this period that have wheels to make them move. I feel like if they didn’t have camels the ancient Egyptians would have gone with sleds. Sand and snow have almost the same consistency at times and Egypt had an abundance of dogs. Makes since to me at least. that’s all well and good but I don’t think any y'all understand just how terrific an undertaking sailing in the open Atlantic is.Hurr durr whytefokes suck I get it. Also the Egyptians would have probably written about finding the Americas. Just saying. That kind of thing doesn’t typically go unrecorded. The Vikings made it to America, too. In reality the mummy was contaminated by those handling the corpse post discovery.The reason Vikings made it to Vinland, or as we call it now Newfoundland, was due partially to their longboat technology but was also due to the route they took.Longboats were fast and maneuverable, perfect for swift hit-and-run raids in the sheltered seas and waterways of Europe, the ideal boat to go viking in.Yet the Norse who came to Newfoundland were not fierce raiders in search of pillage and plunder. The Norse appearance here was the final step in a relatively peaceful expansion of livestock farmers across the North Atlantic, taking in parts of the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland, and finally Vinland.The Norse expansion into the North Atlantic occurred between 800 and 1000 CE, and may have been caused by a combination of population pressures and political unrest in the Norse homeland. Norsemen appear to have left their homeland in search of a place where their old customs and freedoms were not so threatened. Iceland, discovered by the Norse in 860, appears to have been settled by ca. 874 and was fully occupied by 930. Indeed, the occupation of Iceland was so rapid that the island soon felt the pressures of overpopulation. By 975 a major famine had struck, so that interest in finding new lands for expansion remained strong. Rumours of lands to the west, possibly fed by earlier Irish voyages, led to the discovery of Greenland in 982 by Erik the Red. Three years later, a major colonizing expedition of several hundred people was organized in Iceland and sailed to Greenland.In the North Atlantic, the Norse used stout, sea-worthy vessels known as “knarrs.” Although there were limits to how much they could carry, they were more suited for carrying cargo.The knarr was also open to the elements and, though driven by a sail, it was small enough to be rowed. Most knarrs were built in Europe and exported to Greenland. This made Greenland dependent on secure trade links with Europe.Knarrs were similar in construction to the staple longboat, but lacked in man powered rowing the larger vessels utilized, though some could still do this presumably.Greenland however was dependent on trade with Europe, the region was not suited to growing grain, and so the raising of sheep and goats dominated the agricultural economy. Stock-raising of this type, together with the impact of substantial numbers of people moving into Icelandand and Greenland, caused environmental degradation. Trees were felled to heat homes and smelt iron, and turf was stripped from the thin soils. The result was erosion and soil damage. To make matters worse, after 1250 AD, a period of climatic cooling known as the “Little Ice Age” began, causing the agricultural economy of the region to deteriorate dramatically.It is necessary to explain all these developments if we are to understand why the Norse failed to colonize North America successfully, for it was from these Greenland settlements, and not the Norse homeland in Europe, that the Norse explorers of North America came, around the year 1000.According to the sagas, a merchant-shipowner named Bjarni was making his way from Iceland to Greenland in 986 CE when he was blown off course by a severe storm. When the storm ended, he found himself off an unfamiliar shore. He recognized that this was not his intended landfall. The land was too forested, and he was too far south. Bjarni therefore headed north, arriving in Greenland about a week later. During the return trip, he noted a changing landscape as he progressed north, from forested hills, to a flat, heavily forested coastline, to glaciated mountains.This had not been an intentional voyage of discovery, nor was Bjarni interested in following through on his discovery. As a merchant, he was interested primarily in trading with established communities, not investing in risky and speculative efforts to establish new ones. It was an attitude that would be shared 500 years later by the merchants of Bristol.The Greenland colonists were not interested in immediately exploiting the new discovery, for they had just recently arrived in Greenland. Because they were still busy establishing themselves, Bjarni’s voyage did not inspire a return trip for nearly a decade. Then Leif, the son of Erik the Red, retraced Bjarni’s route in reverse. He passed a land of rock and ice, which he called Helluland – probably Baffin Island – and then a country that was flat and wooded, which he called Markland. This was probably part of southern Labrador. He eventually reached a land which the sagas describe as a land of grassy meadows, with rivers full of salmon, and enough other resources to encourage over-wintering. Leif gave this land the name “Vinland.” The men proceeded to build houses in typical Greenland Norse fashion, with sod-walls and peaked roofs of timber and sod. When Leif and his crew returned to Greenland, their reports of this new land aroused interest in further exploration.One such expedition was led by Leif’s brother, Thorvald, who was able to locate Leif’s wintering place. Thorvald was eventually killed in a skirmish with local natives that the Greenlanders called “Skraelings.” From the saga descriptions, it is impossible to say whether these Skraelings were Indians or Inuit. Another brother, Thorstein, attempted to sail to Vinland but spent much of the summer fighting contrary winds and seas before giving up and returning to Greenland. The most ambitious effort was led by Thorfinn, and included women and livestock. This expedition apparently remained in Vinland for two or three years, but eventually abandoned the effort after hostilities broke out with the natives. Thus, the discovery of Vinland was not followed by successful settlement and exploitation of the New World.Thorfinn who you might know from the new anime Vinland Saga.Now, I mentioned why the area they were in was important to how they got to Newfoundland, here is a map.That is a nearly impossible distance to traverse without making stops along the way, this distance by our modern view doesn’t seem like much, but there is a reason some Vikings thought that if you sailed far enough you’d fall off the edge of the world, the reason being that if you were to sail straight out at that time you would most likely capsize from the storms, waves or simply run out of supplies.Now let’s compare this to the distance between North Africa and Central or South America.Now don’t get me wrong, they could’ve done it, but they couldn’t have sailed straight across the Atlantic in that period, it was impossible, unless you’re suggesting they were some hyper advanced sailing civilization, but then it wouldn’t make sense how the sea people caused the bronze age collapse.Now onto how they could’ve feasibly gotten to America, they could take the same route the vikings did, however such a trip would leave a plethora of archeological evidence, as we see with many human migrations, not just that it would’ve taken years, possibly decades, they would’ve influenced local populations in Europe, even conquered them depending.You would’ve seen Egyptian style settlements all along European coasts, Egyptian artifacts, the spreading of the writing system ect, but we don’t, we have no evidence of that, what we have is a mummy that has been contaminated by its handlers and a bunch of woke tumblrites using it as an excuse to shit on the West. -- source link