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Arglebargle III posted:I seem to remember copper (which is easy to smelt) being the most commonly worked metal in North America but this really isn't my area. But no simple iron tools just weren't made in NA because producing iron requires smelting technologies they didn't have. Specifically smelting iron ore requires specialized furnaces that get very hot. Copper ore can be smelted in a hot campfire. The big urban empires in Mexico and Peru certainly had metal working technology, given all the gold they had. Why iron working was never pursued seems to be an open question. Perhaps it's just a cultural thing; if metals are valued as manufactured goods, but not as weapons, perhaps there's just no incentive to start looking for harder and harder metals?
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Dec 30, 2014 16:13
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PittTheElder posted:The big urban empires in Mexico and Peru certainly had metal working technology, given all the gold they had. Why iron working was never pursued seems to be an open question. From what I have gathered, iron smelting was discovered in basically one place and spread from there. It is not a simple technological step. It's quite possible those in the New World just never happened upon the recipe.
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Dec 30, 2014 16:18
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Atlantis-chat: OP, can we get the Atlantis portion of this thread nominated for the Comedy goldmine? The EVE Online thread, of all things, is getting a kick out of the Atlantis derail. To contribute something...A few pages ago someone asked about round shields versus square shields. Very early in Rome's history, Romans used a phalanx, similar to the Greeks. In a phalanx, soldiers are shoulder-to-shoulder--in modern military parlance, "at close interval"--forming a wall of shields and spears. With the advent of the manipular legion during the Samnite Wars, individual soldiers spread out. In modern military parlance, they would be at "normal interval", or about an arm's length from each other. This allowed the formation to turn and flex far more rapidly, but meant the individual soldier had only his own shield for defense. Hence, a square shield becomes more useful. In later Empire history, the heavy use of cavalry meant that infantry began to need spears more than short swords. In addition, horses don't like running into dense formations of men. So, the legions tightened up their formations again and began using more spears, which meant a rounded shield became more useful once again. Even in the many centuries of square shields, the Romans still used the shield wall--called the tortuga, or tortoise. However, it was primarily a defensive formation to resist missile fire, rather than a formation geared around the spear, or designed to fight cavalry.
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Dec 30, 2014 16:20
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PittTheElder posted:The big urban empires in Mexico and Peru certainly had metal working technology, given all the gold they had. Why iron working was never pursued seems to be an open question. Gold is a special case; it overwhelmingly appears native, in pure metallic form. You don't have to smelt it at all. In contrast native iron is vanishingly rare. Iron smelting started out in the old world with the bloomery process which is a fairly complicated two-step process that yields lovely results if you don't know exactly what you're doing. One-step smelting requires a blast furnace with temperatures over 1000 centigrade. Smelting might have been invented independently twice in the old world, or only once if you believe it was transmitted to China from where it started out in the near east. For whatever reason the American civilizations never hit on it, but it's not particularly easy if you don't know exactly what you're doing or you don't already have a crazy hot furnace. And I don't think it's a cultural thing. The American peoples adopted guns, horses and metal tools as soon as they could get them. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 16:37
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Aren't there a few examples of Inuit groups using meteorite iron? I'm not familiar with the techniques required with this so I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't 'smelting' though.
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Dec 30, 2014 16:58
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BrainDance posted:Empire or not, thanks everyone for the stuff about the Phoenicians. I always come into this thread wondering about stuff, but I don't know enough to know what questions to ask. IIRC, they are either pre-writing or proto-writing, so we don't have a ton of written stuff about them, like we do with the more concrete Sumerian era, but the prevailing theory seems to be that they were run by priests or priest-kings, since their settlements are centered around what appear to be temples. The religion itself was probably dedicated to local gods or heroes, and the villages that grew up into cities had their gods grow up into the Sumerian pantheon.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:07
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Obliterati posted:Aren't there a few examples of Inuit groups using meteorite iron? I'm not familiar with the techniques required with this so I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't 'smelting' though. They certainly had the potential to do it, but much like the Norse, they would only have access to very small amounts of it if any at all.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:08
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Obliterati posted:Aren't there a few examples of Inuit groups using meteorite iron? I'm not familiar with the techniques required with this so I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't 'smelting' though. That's true for a lot of places. Prior to the invention of iron smelting, iron was revered as the most precious of metals and reserved exclusively for ceremonial and sacred implements. It was a gift from the gods, fallen straight from heaven.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:10
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Obliterati posted:Aren't there a few examples of Inuit groups using meteorite iron? I'm not familiar with the techniques required with this so I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't 'smelting' though. I want to say that Central American cultures used Obsidian extensively and perhaps their reliance on it negated a need to find something better. Although it's hard to say if quantities were actually great enough to satisfy their needs. The Near East had obsidian as well but eventually moved onto Bronze and Iron. Not sure if that's what you were thinking of.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:21
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Arglebargle III posted:Gold is a special case; it overwhelmingly appears native, in pure metallic form. You don't have to smelt it at all. In contrast native iron is vanishingly rare. Iron smelting started out in the old world with the bloomery process which is a fairly complicated two-step process that yields lovely results if you don't know exactly what you're doing. One-step smelting requires a blast furnace with temperatures over 1000 centigrade. Smelting might have been invented independently twice in the old world, or only once if you believe it was transmitted to China from where it started out in the near east. For whatever reason the American civilizations never hit on it, but it's not particularly easy if you don't know exactly what you're doing or you don't already have a crazy hot furnace. I'm not trying to imply there's something fundamentally different about them, just that they may have valued metal as 'soft shiny stuff', which would be bad for tools, while in Afro-Eurasia it was a combination of that and 'hard, edge retaining material', which means it's useful for tools and especially weapons. Obviously Americans knew a good idea when they saw one, they just hadn't thought of it. That said, I hadn't realized gold was so easy to come by, so that might torpedo my little theory. Do you know how American societies extracted their gold? Roman extraction seems to have been very involved, with water and mercury being pumped everywhere; I'm curious if it was the same story across the Atlantic. Presumably without iron tools it wouldn't have been?
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Dec 30, 2014 17:43
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Thwomp posted:I want to say that Central American cultures used Obsidian extensively and perhaps their reliance on it negated a need to find something better. Although it's hard to say if quantities were actually great enough to satisfy their needs. The Near East had obsidian as well but eventually moved onto Bronze and Iron. I know obsidian was useful in weapons, but was it that useful for tools as well? I seem to recall that it was sharp, but kinda brittle, which seems like it'd make it difficult to use for things like picks, axes, hammers, and hoes and the like.
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Dec 30, 2014 17:53
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I read up on Native American technology a while back and my memory is a little hazy, but the two big themes were A) due to the lack of writing we really don't know what happened to some of the cultures that rose and fell before or directly after contact and B) most of the technology they didn't have was probably due to those technologies not being as useful because of the terrain/animals/plants in the area. If your stone axe works just about as well as the really hard to make bronze axe the guy one village over is making then why are you going to expend a ton of energy and manpower learning that skill and keeping it going? As far as I know North America did not have any ability to smelt copper and just relied on natural copper deposits that they would hammer out to whatever shape they wanted. In South America they actually did have advanced bronze working, but still mostly used it for decorative uses. It was used in tools in South America but again, it wasn't better enough than the stone that it really took off in a big way. If any of that is wrong let me know, but from what I read that was my impression. I just ordered 1491 and I'll read it after I clear out the rest of my backlog.
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Dec 30, 2014 18:00
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Tomn posted:I know obsidian was useful in weapons, but was it that useful for tools as well? I seem to recall that it was sharp, but kinda brittle, which seems like it'd make it difficult to use for things like picks, axes, hammers, and hoes and the like.  Obsidian-toothed scythes from ancient Turkey.
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Dec 30, 2014 18:02
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Question: what all do we know was going on in sub-Saharan West Africa during Classical Antiquity? I'm not really familiar with anything in that area up until the Islamic conquests and the interactions the Arabs had with Ghana. Every discussion I've seen of sub-Saharan Africa in Antiquity has focused on Ethiopia (Aksum etc) and I was wondering what you'd find going on in West Africa around the time of Augustus, or even further back in the time of Pericles. EDIT to clarify: everything I've seen about West Africa basically starts around 700 CE with the first exposure to the Arabs. I'm wondering what we know of the period before that. Patter Song fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 20:13
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PittTheElder posted:I'm not trying to imply there's something fundamentally different about them, just that they may have valued metal as 'soft shiny stuff', which would be bad for tools, while in Afro-Eurasia it was a combination of that and 'hard, edge retaining material', which means it's useful for tools and especially weapons. Obviously Americans knew a good idea when they saw one, they just hadn't thought of it. Are you sure mercury was involved in gold extraction? That sounds like silver mining to me. Gold is special because it's so non reactive. It doesn't bind with oxides to form gold minerals. You just find it in chunks or wires or flakes of already-metal and mechanically separate it from the rock. No chemical process required. Gold and silver often appear in the same rocks and silver does readily bind with mercury which is why I say that sounds like silver mining.
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Dec 31, 2014 01:30
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Obliterati posted:Aren't there a few examples of Inuit groups using meteorite iron? I'm not familiar with the techniques required with this so I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't 'smelting' though. It's interesting that you mentioned Inuits because Greenland is the only place on Earth that has native iron. (That didn't fall out of the sky.) I have no idea whether that deposit was accessible before modern mining though.
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Dec 31, 2014 01:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Are you sure mercury was involved in gold extraction? That sounds like silver mining to me. Gold is special because it's so non reactive. It doesn't bind with oxides to form gold minerals. You just find it in chunks or wires or flakes of already-metal and mechanically separate it from the rock. No chemical process required. Gold binds with mercury well, too. Chemists have long known to keep their gold rings in their pockets when working with mercury. Crush the rock, mix with mercury to extract the metal. Boil off the mercury to recover the metal.
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Dec 31, 2014 01:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Are you sure mercury was involved in gold extraction? That sounds like silver mining to me. Gold is special because it's so non reactive. It doesn't bind with oxides to form gold minerals. You just find it in chunks or wires or flakes of already-metal and mechanically separate it from the rock. No chemical process required. I had thought they did, but a quick peek around the internet doesn't reveal anything, so now I'm not sure where that idea came from. I swear I've read about large mercurial deposits in Spain that date to the Roman era, possibly in this thread. I assumed they were using it to leach something from the earth, but I'm not sure what now. E: a couple places mention that mercury was and is used in gold extraction somehow, today mostly by independent miners, but no details. 
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Dec 31, 2014 01:57
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Deteriorata posted:Gold binds with mercury well, too. Chemists have long known to keep their gold rings in their pockets when working with mercury. Ah okay. I think deteriorata is a chemist so he would know these things. So mercury would be used for poor gold deposits where you're going after bits that are too much trouble to mechanically separate from the rock matrix?
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Dec 31, 2014 02:17
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Arglebargle III posted:Ah okay. I think deteriorata is a chemist so he would know these things. So mercury would be used for poor gold deposits where you're going after bits that are too much trouble to mechanically separate from the rock matrix? Yeah. There are ways to separate the gold out through its density, but small pieces have lots of surface tension and chasing them all down is difficult, particularly if the ore contains relatively small amounts of gold. For a society without much technology, mercury extraction is far simpler. Here's some guys doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOGf9XV3UDo
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Dec 31, 2014 02:24
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Arglebargle III posted:Are you sure mercury was involved in gold extraction? That sounds like silver mining to me. Gold is special because it's so non reactive. It doesn't bind with oxides to form gold minerals. You just find it in chunks or wires or flakes of already-metal and mechanically separate it from the rock. No chemical process required. Gold is generally non-reactive, but not completely. It's notable in that it doesn't react to a lot of the common things that everything else reacts to, thus nuggets and no oxides.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:33
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Patter Song posted:Question: what all do we know was going on in sub-Saharan West Africa during Classical Antiquity? I'm not really familiar with anything in that area up until the Islamic conquests and the interactions the Arabs had with Ghana. Every discussion I've seen of sub-Saharan Africa in Antiquity has focused on Ethiopia (Aksum etc) and I was wondering what you'd find going on in West Africa around the time of Augustus, or even further back in the time of Pericles. Hanno the Navigator supposedly went from Carthage down to Cameroon and wrote about the volcano there. This occured about some time 600-500BCE and apparently was costly as all hell in terms of personnel. He also is the guy who gave Gorillas their name, he just thought they were super savage barbarians not an entirely different species.
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Dec 31, 2014 04:40
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YouTuber posted:He also is the guy who gave Gorillas their name, he just thought they were super savage barbarians not an entirely different species. Over a 1500 years later, in 1968, he would proven right by Planet of the Apes.  Hogge Wild posted:What kind of sanitation did ancient Chinese cities have? Your question got me curious, so I started looking into it. What I found out comes mostly from an article on Ancientworld.net (http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/1206707) which seems to be mostly an online community. In other words, I am not sure how reliable the article is. Here are the source the article quotes: Sources: Benn, Charles. China's Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty, Oxford University Press, 2002 Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276, MacMillan, 1962 China Culture theplumber.com World Plumbing Apparently, it depends on the time period. Quoting from the article directly (I removed the anecdotes): Han dynasty: In 2000, archaeologists found a toilet with a stone seat, armrests and running water in a Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD) tomb. Clay models of combination pigsty-privies have been found in Han dynasty burials, a fine example of early recycling. These can still be found in rural areas of China today. There is archaeological evidence that men and women used separate public privies. The artifacts supporting this are supposed to be on display at the Agricultural Museum of China in Beijing, though I cannot find any pictures. TANG DYNASTY During the Tang dynasty (618-907), all but the houses of the poorest had privies. These weren't all that nice though, usually just a slatted wooden structure sheltering a pit in the ground over which the user had to squat. These were erected as far away from the house as possible, since they stank. People would put dried jujubes (the fruits of the Chinese buckthorn, Ziziphus zizyphus) into their nostrils before entering to combat the odor. SONG DYNASTY In the late Song dynasty (1250-1276), the houses of the richer citizens of Hanzhou had cesspools. The book is unclear how these cesspools were dealt with, but it states that the canals of Hanzhou were meticulously cleaned, particularly during the hottest months of the summer, to prevent the spread of disease. The poor people went in buckets, the contents of which were collected every day by workers called "pourers". These people were highly organized and had territories which they fiercely protected, since they could sell their gleanings for fertilizer. QING DYNASTY In the Qing dynasty, the emperor decreed that there were to be no public toilets anywhere near the palace area. This was a fine idea for the court, since they had portable toilets which were carried around to wherever they were needed, and cleaned out, by imperial workers. The citizens suffered though, because of the layout of the city. Bejing expanded in circles emanating from the Forbidden City. Neighborhoods, known as hutongs, consisted of groups of narrow streets and alleys surrounded by courtyard houses. Most of these housing lots were too narrow to include private privies, and so the inhabitants had long frequented public bathrooms. When the last Qing emperor abdicated, there were but eight public toilets in the whole of Beijing. Also, from multiple other articles I've seen, it seems toilet taper was invented in China. According to what I've read, the first reference to toilet paper appear in the 6th century AD in the imperial court. (http://ancientstandard.com/2007/05/...0%A6-hopefully/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/08/toilet-paper-was-first-used-by-the-chinese/ and a few others) Dalael fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Dec 31, 2014 |
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Dec 31, 2014 05:21
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Nintendo Kid posted:They certainly had the potential to do it, but much like the Norse, they would only have access to very small amounts of it if any at all. The main source for Inuit iron were the meteorites. Eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite Dalael posted:(http://ancientstandard.com/2007/05/...0%A6-hopefully/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/08/toilet-paper-was-first-used-by-the-chinese/ and a few others) Greeks having asswiping stones and Americans using corn cobs was new to me.
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Dec 31, 2014 07:38
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Dalael posted:Over a 1500 years later, in 1968, he would proven right by Planet of the Apes. I find many of your posts to be  , but will admit that this is a good post about .
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Jan 1, 2015 22:02
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Hogge Wild posted:Greeks having asswiping stones and Americans using corn cobs was new to me. Where do the three seashells fit into all this?
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Jan 1, 2015 22:50
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Those of you who would enjoy a man earnestly making the accusation that Rome fell because of too much homosexuality should peruse the DnD thread on Jesus presently, and bask in the glow of true  at work.
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Jan 2, 2015 02:20
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A rare case of the reverse-Gibbon thesis.
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Jan 2, 2015 06:54
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StashAugustine posted:A rare case of the reverse-Gibbon thesis. Rare?
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Jan 2, 2015 11:08
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I finally did it. I have now read the entire thread from start to finish. Really an awesome thread guys. Thanks for all the effort. And now to a question. There has been a few references to a climate change during the 300. But I would like to know more about the climate before, now I just know the after. Our was it a temporary thing like the one on the 1600?
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Jan 2, 2015 12:58
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As I understand it, there was a minor warming event in that period. I know that for a reasonable period you could grow wine even in some northern areas of Britain, which is still not really practicable today.
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Jan 2, 2015 13:00
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sebzilla posted:Where do the three seashells fit into all this? The first source that Dalael posted says that they were used.
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Jan 2, 2015 13:28
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Disinterested posted:As I understand it, there was a minor warming event in that period. I know that for a reasonable period you could grow wine even in some northern areas of Britain, which is still not really practicable today. Was the warming prior then, and the cooling of was in the 300? It getting colder would explain all the migrations. I have realised that most troublesome times in history are related to changes in the climate. Anywhere you look if there are big political events somewhere there is almost always an accompanying change in climate.
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Jan 2, 2015 14:42
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Born again bible thumping Christian family member assures me that Rome fell because of homosexuality
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Jan 2, 2015 20:27
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Christoff posted:Born again bible thumping Christian family member assures me that Rome fell because of homosexuality Point out to them that the homosexuality was in turn caused by climate change. All those tight vests and short-shorts.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:39
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Christoff posted:Born again bible thumping Christian family member assures me that Rome fell because of homosexuality They were loving dudes right from the start, if God cursed Rome because of the gayness he sure took his sweet time.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:28
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God works slowly. It took him 4224 years between the creation of the Earth and the creation of the nation that he truly favors.
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Jan 3, 2015 03:17
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I got Everitt's "Cicero" for Christmas and am really enjoying it. Everitt mentions in the book that Cicero wrote a "Secret History" of the times (including his thoughts of the first Triumvate) that he didn't dare publish while he was alive, but that surfaced after his death and was well-read (and referenced) throughout antiquity, but was lost at some point since then. Looking this up I couldn't find any reference to it, the only listing of his missing works are a book on philosophy, the book he wrote after the death of his daughter, and four tragedies - can anyone tell me any more about it? What other works referenced it, what kind of content it may have included etc?
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Jan 3, 2015 05:27
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my dad posted:About Rome? "Hannibal Ante Portas" (1960) by Slavomir Nastasijevi I might be an idiot, but I can't find a version that's in English. Only one on amazon seems to be in Serbian? Is there some other title I should be looking under?
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Jan 3, 2015 09:14
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Tunicate posted:I might be an idiot, but I can't find a version that's in English. Only one on amazon seems to be in Serbian? Holy poo poo, looks like it was never translated. I even checked if Zagreb publishing houses had editions in English, and nope. Goddamn.  Sorry about getting your hopes up.
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