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I think Roman explorers did reach what is now Nigeria (broadly speaking) but their main goal was to try to find the source of various trade goods and they were not successful in so doing. They did reach the Canaries, though I think not the Azores.
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Sep 25, 2023 16:59
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I mean the old adage is the Romans turned the Mediterranean sea into a Roman lake. Pompey famously quipped that it was now "Our sea". They defeated the other naval powers of the region and virtually wiped out piracy. You don't do that without naval know-how.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:06
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zoux posted:What was the Roman conception of the oceans outside of the Med? I presume they had some shipping that ran in the Bay of Biscay and up to England, but did they ever turn left at Gibraltar and sail/row down the African coastline? What did they think lay over those horizons? Romans went down the west coast of Africa a bit, they don't seem to have gone too far since there's not much there. Explored the Canary Islands. On the east coast, they went at least as far south as Zanzibar, that was a regular trade outpost. The Indian Ocean had lots of Roman activity, there were Roman outposts in southwest India. Roman trade also went further east, around Malaysia and up the coast of China. There's dispute about if Roman ships were doing this or it was all other middlemen but I am quite certain at least some of it was done by Romans themselves. As for the Atlantic, they considered that The Ocean that surrounds the world and don't seem to have ever tried to cross it. But traffic through Gibraltar and up to the Atlantic coast of Gaul/Britannia was common. Ships also seem to have gone into the Baltic enough that there are descriptions of it.  The ol' Ptolemy map is a decent visualization of the Roman understanding of geography.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:25
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Yeah, thinking about it more the theory about corvuses causing shipwrecks does seem a bit of a stretch, although I have seen it proposed seriously before. In terms of Roman sailing outside the Mediterranean, they were pretty active in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. There's a navigational guide written in Greek from the 1st century AD that describes the sailing conditions, ports, and trade goods of the Red Sea, East Africa, and Western India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea. Based on the wealth of detail in this text, it's pretty clear that Romans were actively involved in the trade with East Africa and India, and it wasn't just going through intermediaries.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:28
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CrypticFox posted:Based on the wealth of detail in this text, it's pretty clear that Romans were actively involved in the trade with East Africa and India, and it wasn't just going through intermediaries. Yep. Enough Romans were living full-time in India that they built temples. There were military outposts on Red Sea islands to protect the trade since it was so valuable. Also why Augustus wanted to conquer Yemen.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:33
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Also, even before the Greeks made it to the Western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established several settlements on the Atlantic coast of Africa. There are three known Phoenician settlements on the Atlantic coast of modern day Morocco, with the furthest south being at what it now Rabat. It's almost certain that they would been sailing further south than that as well, since they probably wouldn't have a settlement in modern Rabat if that was the farthest point they ever reached.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:44
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I sea power, I eat it.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:03
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The greatest maritime power of all was, of course, the Sea Peoples.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:43
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CrypticFox posted:Also, even before the Greeks made it to the Western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established several settlements on the Atlantic coast of Africa. There are three known Phoenician settlements on the Atlantic coast of modern day Morocco, with the furthest south being at what it now Rabat. It's almost certain that they would been sailing further south than that as well, since they probably wouldn't have a settlement in modern Rabat if that was the farthest point they ever reached.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:47
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Nessus posted:How good were the Phoenician ships? Would it have been possible for them to hit South America the way that, I gather, Basque fishermen were fishing off Newfoundland for a long time and just keeping their mouths shut about it? The issue with that is more the lack of navigational aids that make cross-ocean travel really possible. Without the chronometer, sailors have zero way of knowing how far east or west they may have traveled. Even with the chronometer, you still only have dead reckoning, but it is much easier with fixed units of time. North/South sailing has always been easy thanks to astronomical aids. Historically sailors used to stick close to the coasts or take very boxy routes because of this information gap. Sailing to America is difficult not only because of the quality/build of vessels needed for the voyage, but also you need to be able to confidently navigate open ocean, which prior to GPS was still very tricky.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:51
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What was the leap in tech or understanding that permitted navigation in open seas in the age of sail that was unavailable to the Romans? This goes to my general and longstanding question of "Why didn't the Romans build square rigged, triple masted ships of the line with like scorpions instead of guns"?
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Sep 25, 2023 19:56
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zoux posted:What was the leap in tech or understanding that permitted navigation in open seas in the age of sail that was unavailable to the Romans? This goes to my general and longstanding question of "Why didn't the Romans build square rigged, triple masted ships of the line with like scorpions instead of guns"? I mentioned the chronometer because it actually made it much easier, but it really wasn't in use until the 1700s. Basically, as I said, the problem is determining your longitude. You can easily find out latitude with celestial bodies, but there is nothing you can use short of fixed landmarks for longitude (and even those are not always reliable). As such, east/west travel is much more difficult than north/south. Crossing the Atlantic was possible for Romans, but the missing link isn't technology - it's a need to cross the ocean. 1400s Europe wasn't exactly doing great, and a possible suicide mission across a massive ocean was appealing.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:02
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The vikings did it in fairly similar boats, although they had much less far to go compared to what you'd have to do if you struck out from Italy or Africa, and they could island-hop. I've never really been sure why the vikings seemed to explode all over Europe all of a sudden. In theory, the Romans could've sailed around the Sahara to establish contact with sub-saharan Africa, which was one of the main reasons Portugal developed its long-distance caravels, but they never did. I dunno, I guess they weren't that into boats.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:05
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Mr. Nice! posted:I mentioned the chronometer because it actually made it much easier, but it really wasn't in use until the 1700s. If only they had they known about tomatoes I also presume that the navigation conditions in the Med are probably a lot calmer on average than the Atlantic, how bad did/do the Med seas get? I know of once instance in which an entire ship of 13 men was swamped and nearly sank, but fortunately one of the crew could walk upon water. SlothfulCobra posted:The vikings did it in fairly similar boats, although they had much less far to go compared to what you'd have to do if you struck out from Italy or Africa, and they could island-hop. I've never really been sure why the vikings seemed to explode all over Europe all of a sudden. Ran out of land in Scandinavia.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:09
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There was that one attempted viking colony in Newfoundland, but the Indians ran 'em off if I recall correctly.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:29
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zoux posted:If only they had they known about tomatoes And chilis. And maize, potatoes, tobacco, and chocolate.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:38
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zoux posted:
That wasn't in the Mediterranean.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:03
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CrypticFox posted:Also, even before the Greeks made it to the Western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established several settlements on the Atlantic coast of Africa. There are three known Phoenician settlements on the Atlantic coast of modern day Morocco, with the furthest south being at what it now Rabat. It's almost certain that they would been sailing further south than that as well, since they probably wouldn't have a settlement in modern Rabat if that was the farthest point they ever reached. the phoenicians were once commissioned by a pharaoh to circumnavigate africa and as far as we can tell they genuinely did because the story contains details that indicate they made it deep into the southern hemisphere; stuff that nobody who lived in the northern hemisphere would have imagined being different if you went south, like the direction of the sun. however it took years and doesn't seem to have led to any kind of sustained exploration efforts or settlement
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Sep 25, 2023 21:13
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Hippocrass posted:That wasn't in the Mediterranean. Yeah, "walking on water" sounds more like a fable. Or did this happen on the Dead Sea?
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Sep 25, 2023 21:17
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Libluini posted:Yeah, "walking on water" sounds more like a fable. Or did this happen on the Dead Sea? Some lake, presumably around Nazareth. I don't think it was the Dead Sea but I'm no Christololgist.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:19
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zoux posted:What was the leap in tech or understanding that permitted navigation in open seas in the age of sail that was unavailable to the Romans? This goes to my general and longstanding question of "Why didn't the Romans build square rigged, triple masted ships of the line with like scorpions instead of guns"? I don't know enough about ships to know the exact technological advancements, other than Roman ships just weren't good for long open ocean voyages and the ones later were far more capable. As for why they didn't build better ships, there are two main reasons. One is that there are lots of little technological advancements along the way that enable further ones, Romans couldn't just leap to building late medieval ships. The other is motivation. Why would they bother? Their ships did the job they needed them to. Romans weren't much into change for change's sake, they weren't big explorers and the idea of technological progress didn't really exist. You also have to know that going west requires going south to around the Canaries to catch the proper winds to cross, which they did not. You can't just sail straight across. Same thing with going south, to get to southwest Africa you have to swing way out into the Atlantic first and loop around. I believe the reason Portugal ended up with Brazil is they were doing that for their trade routes around Africa to get to India and somebody swung too far and ran into the far tip of South America.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:22
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Grand Fromage posted:and the idea of technological progress didn't really exist. Frontinus definitely had that notion about their civic technology
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Sep 25, 2023 21:27
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The Sea of Galilee
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Sep 25, 2023 21:29
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Tunicate posted:Frontinus definitely had that notion about their civic technology Also, one of John Philoponus's arguments against Aristotelian eternalism was that human civilization being infinitely old would imply infinite technological progress. But Philoponus was a pretty unconventional thinker whose views shouldn't be taken as typical.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:33
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Silver2195 posted:Also, one of John Philoponus's arguments against Aristotelian eternalism was that human civilization being infinitely old would imply infinite technological progress. But Philoponus was a pretty unconventional thinker whose views shouldn't be taken as typical.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:37
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Silver2195 posted:Also, one of John Philoponus's arguments against Aristotelian eternalism was that human civilization being infinitely old would imply infinite technological progress. But Philoponus was a pretty unconventional thinker whose views shouldn't be taken as typical. The history of modern science proved John Philoponus wrong there, I think. Turns out the universe is so loving complex, human civilization can indeed infinitely progress. It's just that both scientific and technological progress will slow down over time, as it becomes harder and harder to advance. Of course eventually, infinite progress will be so slow it'll be effectively stagnation, anyway. Aristotelian Eternalism doesn't sound so wrong when viewed from that angle, it's just missing the context of an endlessly expanding and contracting universe as being the eternal part. Human civilization, on the other hand, is as eternal as the fruit flies I accidentally killed today when I ate a piece of fruit.
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Sep 25, 2023 21:46
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Libluini posted:Aristotelian Eternalism doesn't sound so wrong when viewed from that angle, it's just missing the context of an endlessly expanding and contracting universe as being the eternal part. Human civilization, on the other hand, is as eternal as the fruit flies I accidentally killed today when I ate a piece of fruit. That's not really right either. The universe is very old (about 13.8 billion years old), but not infinitely old, and the current scientific consensus is that it will expand until it eventually reaches thermodynamic equilibrium, rather than alternately expanding and contracting forever.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:01
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know enough about ships to know the exact technological advancements, other than Roman ships just weren't good for long open ocean voyages and the ones later were far more capable. As for why they didn't build better ships, there are two main reasons. One is that there are lots of little technological advancements along the way that enable further ones, Romans couldn't just leap to building late medieval ships. The other is motivation. Why would they bother? Their ships did the job they needed them to. Romans weren't much into change for change's sake, they weren't big explorers and the idea of technological progress didn't really exist. Not a really a boat guy, but basically the Mediterranean is relatively stable and calm compared to either the Atlantic or the Pacific and as a result most Roman ships didn't really need to account for lovely waves and weather. This makes them great for the Mediterranean or for general coastal sailing but in anything else it would founder and sink. I agree with you that they probably didn't really care enough to try, but they could have figured it out if they wanted to make their ships more sea worthy, it's not really a difficult thing to pull off. There's been several expeditions, studies, and crazy people over the years that have pretty fairly shown you could sail from Africa to the Americas with the technology and boats available to the Romans. Obviously, the people doing this in modern times have the advantage of knowing where they are going and being able to correctly stock up for the journey length, but I mean some folks in like the 60s put together a large raft with a single sail and made the trip. Personally I think the fact we have pretty decent evidence of Polynesian contact with the Americas sometime around the early 1000s is neater. Or that poo poo was getting traded into the Americas through the Aleutians from Eurasia for probably loving forever. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 22:43
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know enough about ships to know the exact technological advancements, other than Roman ships just weren't good for long open ocean voyages and the ones later were far more capable. As for why they didn't build better ships, there are two main reasons. One is that there are lots of little technological advancements along the way that enable further ones, Romans couldn't just leap to building late medieval ships. The other is motivation. Why would they bother? Their ships did the job they needed them to. Romans weren't much into change for change's sake, they weren't big explorers and the idea of technological progress didn't really exist. That is indeed what happened re: Brazil. And yeah it's no single technological issue beyond "Romans aren't building ocean going ships (in the Atlantic) because they aren't interested in crossing many oceans (certainly not the Atlantic)". Obviously the knowledge required for oceanic navigation existed in the western Indian ocean basin since they were doing that crossing plenty, but there's no great reason to start porting that over to the Atlantic side because where are you going to go? There are some attempts to reach western sub-Saharan Africa, but Cape Bajador is a serious obstacle to bypass and one that you won't succeed at if you're used to sailing within sight of the coast. The late medieval west European situation where state-level budgets are being invested into building large ocean going vessels and navigating around Africa are happening because they know the wealth of India is out there (something they have in common with the Romans), but more importantly because the Venetians and Ottomans where effectively freezing the said western Europe states out of the existing Indian trade networks. The Romans had no such problem, even after the Arab conquests; having a political frontier in the way can't have been great for business, but it doesn't seem to have been a serious problem. Columbus also doing the same thing when he bumps into Hispanola, although there the problem is being frozen out of the new circum-African route.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:50
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Telsa Cola posted:There's been several expeditions, studies, and crazy people over the years that have pretty fairly shown you could sail from Africa to the Americas with the technology and boats available to the Romans. Sure. If you went to Roman sailors with some chocolate and said hey I know where you can get this, there's a continent right here, here's how far it is and where the winds are, they could've done it. Also have to remember Europeans were doing deep ocean voyages for quite a while before Columbus. He didn't just wake up one day and sail to the Caribbean, it was the culmination of a couple hundred years. If the Romans had some motivation to sail out into the Atlantic for long enough they probably would've ended up in the Americas eventually. And they would've developed ships better suited to the purpose. The Spanish and Portuguese were exploring because they wanted trade with India and China without having to pay through the nose for all the middlemen. The Romans were just sailing themselves via the Red Sea, they had no reason to try to discover another route since they could just go to India and get their Indian poo poo whenever they wanted to. They also had a reasonably accurate measurement of how big the Earth is, so unlike Columbus' wildly incorrect personal Math Genius one anyone thinking about sailing west to get to Asia was probably dissuaded at the idea of having to sail like 15,000 miles or whatever it is through what, as far as they knew, was just empty ocean. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 22:52
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Also the Romans were sailing around Great Britain so it's not like they were unable to handle the North Sea with their ships it's just that it wasn't commercially profitable to deal with everything outside the lead/silver mines of Britain.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:55
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Grand Fromage posted:Roman trade also went further east, around Malaysia and up the coast of China. There's dispute about if Roman ships were doing this or it was all other middlemen but I am quite certain at least some of it was done by Romans themselves. Oh so this is interesting. The Chinese records are pretty robust and what we have for pre-Tang is 3 instances of Romans in China, one in Eastern Han (~166CE), one to Cao Wei (220CE), and one to Later Jin (286CE). The first of those is in a lot of ways the most telling: the Chinese were really unimpressed. The common theory is that the Romans left for China with some distinctive and valuable Roman goods but lost them in transit, and had to make do with some decidedly less impressive local goods as their tribute. And of course both states were about to enter into some Rough Times, so continuous contact was not a high priority for either and on the Chinese end, the fact that the 3 delegations functionally wound up in 3 different eras shows that setting up an actual continuing relationship was not going to be easy. Going the other direction, there's a Roman record of a person from Seres (China) in the time of Augustus, but since the Chinese records are quite clear that the first official mission that got as far west as Mesopotamia was the utterly incredible Gan Ying in 97CE, I'd say this was most likely an independent merchant. Anyway, there were a lot of obstacles to an actual direct relationship between China and Rome, even for individual merchants, that I think can be summarized pretty readily as "the many independent countries between the two that all had a vested interest in protecting middlemen operations." Its POSSIBLE there were some Roman merchants inside China more than those official embassies but they're not well attested. However Roman goods inside China are well attested, especially sea silk, so even if there were some Roman merchants in China, their goods were more often coming through intermediaries.
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Sep 25, 2023 22:58
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Grand Fromage posted:the idea of technological progress didn't really exist. Specifically the idea of technology is what was lacking. Romans had many technologies (as we would understand it), but no concept that they were all united as “technology”. Perhaps the closest equivalent “techne” was a much broader term, in some way closer to meaning “skill” or “craft”, and including many things we wouldn’t think of as technological. Technology is a modern idea (some might say quintessentially modern). Progress existed, though. Romans didn’t call it that (“progressus” just means a journey to somewhere), and they didn’t see how it could have pertained to technology, but they actually came up with a whole nascent ideology of progress in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the state Christianity of Eusebius, Ambrose, etc. Particularly associated with the point of view that God had chosen to bless Rome with imperium sine fine just so as to ensure the progress of the true religion. Obviously reality debunked that before too long. Mommsen wrote a fully sick article about how Augustine’s “City of God” was written on precisely this topic. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707751
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Sep 25, 2023 22:59
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There was more contact, DNA studies on skeletons have found a surprising number of bodies in Roman contexts who were from China and at least one who was likely from Japan. Also Indians but that is not a huge surprise given the amount of contact between India and the Mediterranean world. E: Not to imply there were Asian people all over, but the fact we found any suggests that there was more than you might thing. If you were walking the streets of Rome in like, 100 AD it wouldn't have been crazy to think you'd see East Asian or Indian people around now and then. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 23:01
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Silver2195 posted:That's not really right either. The universe is very old (about 13.8 billion years old), but not infinitely old, and the current scientific consensus is that it will expand until it eventually reaches thermodynamic equilibrium, rather than alternately expanding and contracting forever. I mean, it's more right than whatever Aristotle was smoking. The truth is, we don't know how old the entire universe is, current consensus is only valid if we assume that time itself started with the Big Bang. If the universe actually contracted into a single point before that and this current universe is just one of many possible cycles, the actual age could actually indeed be infinite, or as close as you can get to infinite. To go away a bit from what is pretty much philosophy at that point, current scientific consensus is that the universe probably will continue to expand, but we don't actually know for sure. Right now we assume there isn't enough total mass in the universe we observe to prevent the expansion from just continuing on indefinitely, but that's not a given. We could be wrong about the amount of matter we measure, the amount of dark matter we assume could be way off, and the unobservable part of the universe could be big enough to contain enough matter to make up for what we think is missing.
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Sep 25, 2023 23:03
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Grand Fromage posted:You also have to know that going west requires going south to around the Canaries to catch the proper winds to cross, which they did not. You can't just sail straight across. Same thing with going south, to get to southwest Africa you have to swing way out into the Atlantic first and loop around. I believe the reason Portugal ended up with Brazil is they were doing that for their trade routes around Africa to get to India and somebody swung too far and ran into the far tip of South America. Yeah this is key - the trade winds make going from Iberia to Brazil or the Ivory Coast counterintuitive. It required trial and error in expensive and dangerous expeditions for the Portuguese to figure out the logic.
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Sep 25, 2023 23:26
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It's still crazy to me that as recently as 60 years ago were were still just setting sail from port and making educated guesses about how far we had traveled in any east/west direction and hoped we got where we were going.
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Sep 25, 2023 23:33
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The Med can get extremely stormy. I’ve been on a 300ft vessel that snapped one of its mooring lines due to wind and wave action in Gaeta, Italy. While there may not be hurricanes and cyclone it’s still no joke and just as dangerous to ill prepared mariners.
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Sep 26, 2023 00:30
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Ghost Leviathan posted:You wildly overestimate how well farmers tend to understand goddamn anything besides maybe their day to day job. Farming commodity grains is extremely complicated to be successful in and yes they need to understand the logistics and futures trading to be to not go broke and that is generally ontop of having masters related to agriculture.
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Sep 26, 2023 00:53
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I'd be curious if anyone's read about the topic in depth because I've only ever seen it brought up tangentially, but my impression is that notably, it's thought that China wasn't nearly so much of a sea power at this point. I've read in a few places that it wasn't until I want to say something like the 600s or 700s that ships could reliably navigate across the East China Sea to Japan; it's around that point that direct contact/trade between Japan and the Chinese court picks up, whereas before then it was largely via the Korean Peninsula. During Han times (and for a while later) ships would hug the coast, hopping from Lelang Commandery at Pyongyang -> the area around Busan -> Tsushima -> onward to Japan, when the trip was made. And it wasn't until the Ming that the geography was fully understood, with the Japanese Archipelago running eastward away from China rather than southward parallel to it. Not for total lack of trying. There's a famous legend that Qin Shi Huang, in search of immortality, had a ridiculously extravagant fleet outfitted to sail east into the unknown in search of the Islands of the Immortals. The fleet made a trip and was unsuccessful, then set out again and was never heard from again. Starting in the middle ages Japanese scholars took this to mean the second trip was a success, the fleet landed in prehistoric Japan, and its leader loved the place so much he settled there permanently -- to this day for reasons that kind of bewilder me you get some people claiming this, and it was for way too long considered a genuinely possible origin of the Yayoi -- but uh, since absolutely no trace of it has been uncovered it's far more likely the ships just disappeared at sea. Outside of the Chinese state, there was navigation from Taiwan (and maybe directly from the Yangtze, but probably stopping over at Taiwan) across the Ryukyu islands and to the archipelago done by Austronesian peoples, going back to Jomon times. Interestingly there's apparently some linguistic evidence this migration carried on (or resumed?) through Han times. The linguist Alexander Vovin in one of his final papers before he passed away theorizes the Hayato and Kumaso 'barbarians' of southern Kyushu might have been Austronesian. Koramei fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 01:10
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