jenniferrpovey: rhaenyra-snow:jenniferrpovey:prokopetz:cantyousayanythingnew:doublehamburger
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). -- source link