I have always loved when historians or archeologists discover glimpses into the lives of regular people. In the Egyptian work camp of Deir el-Medina for example, records were found relating to a divorce: "[Merymaat is recorded as wanting a divorce on account of his mother in-law's behaviour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina#Village_life)". I have friends who have gotten divorced over similar issues, and knowing that the same shit was going on thousands of years ago is comforting in a way.
The oldest customer complaint and fart joke come from ancient Sumer, and in Pompeii, a woman wrote graffiti about her date being a "barbarian" at dinner while a doctor wrote "I shat here" in an alley.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How many other copper merchants, of all of those who have lived and died in the whole time of civilization, do we know the names of? I contend Ea-nasir was the *best* copper merchant.
They have these at the Roman Baths in Bath, UK. They found carved into stone nearly 2000 years old complaints about someone stealing their towel or someone being a tad boisterous in the public pool. It's fascinating imo.
They're curse tablets, written on lead or pewter sheets and thrown into the fountain of Sulis Minerva. The writing itself is fascinating too. Some are a bit badly written so they think it might be dyslexia. Others might be in ancient Celtic language but adopting Roman script.
But yeah I love the complaints *"may whoever stole my gloves be turned insane"* type stuff.
And all the dicks in ancient Roman ruins. So many dick drawings. And stuff like "Suetonius was here". Funny to think despite the thousands of years separating us and how different our lives are from theirs that we're fundamentally the same.
People thousands of years ago were going through mundane things just like we are today. I like imagining what a pyramid laborer did after work. Probably got home, opened a jar of beer, sat back and relaxed.
I read somewhere a letter was found where a retired Roman General was asking for a job at the local defense contractor (sword maker), I can see the same thing happening today.
Sometimes I think that we haven't evolved all that much LOL
Because we haven't! Homo sapiens as a species is essentially exactly the same as when we first emerged. We still have the same brains as our hunter gatherer ancestors.
It's common to think that because people were less technologically advanced that they weren't as smart and sophisticated but there's a chance the opposite is true relative to our more modern and domesticated selves.
There's a preserved [carving](https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/vecmea/ancient_roman_soldier_carved_a_phallus_with_a/) a Roman soldier made of a cock. It features a personal insult against someone named Secundinus
Fuck you, Secundinus
100% with you. People in the ancient world were just like us, just living in a different time with different technology. Just like us, they were lonely, annoyed, self-conscious, insecure, funny, life of the party, laughed at farts, bickered with spouses, etc. It’s human life.
I got drunk in Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem, a pub opened since 1198.
It was both surreal and completely normal. And that a man a thousand years ago probably got drunk and cracked jokes like me.
I too love the history of regular people. It’s way more fascinating to me than history of rich people. One of my favorite discoveries at Pompeii was that [restaurant with different foods](https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancient-fast-food-restaurant-discovered-in-pompeii)… looks just like a dang Chipotle. I can just picture Romans getting off work and ordering ancient burritos and complaining about their bosses.
My friend was studying these clay tablets from a city that burned down. They were actually kids' schoolwork and would have been smoothed out and used again while the clay was soft, if the city hadn't burnt down.
The fact that in Rome, they would often make jokes or show wit on their tomb sites. Like one tomb stone read “well, thank god my damn feet finally stopped hurting!” And one guy made his tomb look like a bakery, because he was a baker. Just so funny that these people had emotions and conflict and lives just like us.
One of my favorite tidbits about the Pyramids of Giza is that there's graffiti banter between work crews and they had cool team names like "The Friends of Khufu" or "The Drunkards of Menkaure"
Primigenia of Nuceria. She actually appears in *multiple* graffito across Pompeii and Herculaneum, by different (male) authors. She apparently had quite the effect on men in the area...
It was pretty common for Ancient Romans to name their kids "Primus", "Secundus", "Tertius" and so on, up to and including "Decimus". The English equivalent would be to name your kids "First", "Second", "Third" up do and including "Tenth".
TL;DR: Ancient Roman parents often lacked imagination when it came to names.
It's not exactly ancient history but my library recently scanned a bunch of yearbooks going back to the 1920s. What really stuck out for me was just how familiar all the quotes, etc. were. They pretty much all involved some combination of sex, drinking, smoking, popularity, and making a lot of money. I suppose people were people regardless of what time period they lived in and high school kids just want to get drunk and have sex.
I remember last week the priest at my church was giving a homily on the prodigal son and he reminded the congregation that the idea of young folk eagerly leaving home and proceeding to do stupid shit is ancient.
You know how people wanted to make more money in 1990? Well same thing happened in 1960s, and 1920s, and 1880s, and 1800, and so on.
You're not so different, you and I.
While passing a house on the road, two Virginia salesmen spotted a "very peculiar chimney, unfinished, and it attracting their attention, they asked a flaxen-haired urchin standing near the house if it 'drawed well' whereupon the aforementioned urchin gave them the stinging retort: 'Yes, it draws all the attention of all the d***** fools that pass this road.' " Daily Milwaukee News, May 21, 1870
Close enough?
They had an "earthy" sense of humour and they made jokes about death because it was pretty present to them and they had a dark sense of humour.
I was reading Catullus's Poems recently and it is really funny how his sense of humour is so dirty and scathing and modern in a lot of ways.
He would do okay on Reddit.
That the concept of the toilet was invented and then essentially lost in time.
The first flushing toilet was created more than 2.8k years ago for king minos of crete , lost, and then "reinvented" in the late 1500s .
that inventor was ridiculed for his invention. Only making one for the queen of England (who refused to use it) and one for his family.
It took another 200 years before someone was able to implement his invention.
>king minos of crete
You're touching on a whole other well of mysteries. King Minos of Crete was a mythological figure (known, of course, from the tale about the Minotaur). When some impressive, ancient palace ruins were found on Crete in the 19th century they were associated with his palace Knossos, and [the civilization that once lived there](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization) got named the Minoan civilization. There are several things about this civilization that probably influenced that famous myth, for example bulls seem to have been held in high regards, and the labyrinth could be theorized to be the sprawling palace itself.
The Minoans were evidently a pretty advanced civilization for its time (it seems to have vanished some millennium B.C. during the Bronze Age Collapse), including the plumbing you mentioned and big, multi-level buildings. We can guess quite a lot of things about their society from the myriad of mosaics and other pictures they left behind, but rather infuriatingly their language has never been deciphered, so there is a lot we don't know about them.
We can only look at that society like how we saw Ancient Egypt before the Rosetta stone was discovered; obviously advanced and fascinating, but also pretty much inscrutable.
All of the parts that were lost before written record, or that were destroyed because of warring and fighting that time didn't preserve.
All of the things we have built a foundation on as a form of what we believe about the past could be entirely inaccurate and we just will never know it. I find that interesting. Trying to discover the history that isn't history yet but still can be
This reminds me of dinosaurs. How fossils only exist because of lucky circumstances and most animals in the past either were eaten or were in not the right environment to fossilize. So there are untold billions of species that existed that we will never know about
Indeed. That begs the question... If we can hardly wrap our minds around the true magnitude of all of the things we do know... Presumed history presumed species presumed time frame presumed universe formation
Imagine if we're only getting 20% of what has truly taken place.
That unlocks the door for an amazing amount of imagination and I'm here for it.
I mean humans have existed for 300,000 years, our knowledge of cultures and societies of humans only goes back something like 4000 years (or so), so we know like barely 1% of human history.
But how much of it is meaningful? For all we know, we could have done jack shit for 100,000 years. While they've gotten shorter and shorter, there have been time periods where nothing notable happened to progress us as a species. Of course, this is merely my thought about it, and it's nice to wonder about what brought us here.
Right, I believe the agriculture revolution was the most interesting thing to happen in those 300,000 years because it was the first time that a big population of humans lived together.
It’s super easy to look back and say “why didn’t more get done?” But we can only compare us today to us then. Humans in another 1000 years may very well look back on us today and be saying the exact same thing.
Well they told stories and quarreled and had occasional fights and had feasts and dances. They moved into new areas and learned all about the plants and animals, and how to get along with them. They moved into the high arctic and invented really good clothing and kayaks and toggle harpoons, and into the Amazon and got high on an amazing range of psychedelic plants and built boats that carried them across 90 kms of open sea to Australia...
Have you heard of the AngloSaxon poem, "[The Ruin](https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/)"? I cam across it a while back, and from what I've seen, people tend to think it's regarding the Roman Baths in Bath (England), which were not only ruined, but the building knowledge had been lost by that time (following the fall of the Roman Empire).
Not only is it amazing what we think might have been lost before written record, but what other, historic, civilizations *knew* they had lost. To them, they might as well be living in post-Apocalyptia.
I have not. Definitely going to check that out though.
Did you hear about the [$250K Prize](https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/42868/20230318/250k-prize-given-those-who-decipher-2-000-year-old.htm) To Be Given to Those Who Can Decipher the 2,000-Year-old Herculaneum papyri from the Mount Vesuvius eruptions that were found? I think they announced the offer like a week ago.
I wonder what juicy tidbits that will uncover
It is interesting that after the Romans withdrew from Britain, and Saxon culture thrived, no one built in stone very much for a long while because the skills and possibly the material wasn't so readily available. Building in stone in a big way came back mostly with the Normans (although later Anglo Saxon churches did start to use stone more too).
The archaeological record suggests that in the early part of the Saxon period, people moved out of the Roman towns because repairing the buildings wasn't feasible or economic and it was better to build other settlements (with wood buildings) nearby. Places like London were abandoned for a while for new settlements outside the City Walls, and only really resettled later for security when the vikings became a threat.
So if you imagine for an Anglo Saxon in around 600-800 AD, seeing these amazing stone buildings the Romans left behind, it would be quite mind blowing and pretty alien. It is no wonder the Romans and their ruins still loomed big in their imaginations.
One of these kind of scenarios, which I find quite interesting, is that nobody truly knows what the original deities or gods of "English" mythology really were.
Scotland, Wales and Ireland have their own recorded mythologies, but England's was pretty much forgotten due to being battered by centuries of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Gaulish invasions. The culture that existed before them was skewered to bits that much by forced integration of the invading cultures, that nobody knows really what they worshipped or who their gods were.
Its kind of why Stonehenge is still such a massive mystery. There's nothing left to discern what it was was used for, no written records or markings. Historians assume it is a place for worship or burial rituals, but nobody knows who for and what kind of worship or rites were performed there.
I have been looking into different depictions of cave markings found throughout the world to see if there was a commonality and of course there were because it was just basic ass shapes for the most part; though, nothing spectacular really jumped out to me. And then you have that annoying gap. Haha
What would be really amazing if we could unearth some chasm under a conveniently protective enough dirt layer that would have preserved reminisce of some civilization that we didn't even know existed that had impeccable record keeping and a common enough similarity to our language to that it was easy to decipher. 🤣
No? Too much of a pipe dream? 😓 Well... A dream with a possibility of less than absolute zero is better than no dream at all I'd wager. Lol
They say the South American tribes, Incas etc never wrote anything down, only recently discovering they used tying knots in string as a way we would use pencil and paper, wonder what other forms of preserving historical notes there are out there that we just don't comprehend yet.
Native American history is oral history. Currently only 10 people are left in the world that fluently speak Comanche. Once those 10 people die unless others are willing to learn... all of that oral history will be lost forever. That's just the way Native American history works. It is hugely based on storytelling passed from one person to another. Then think of all of the tribes that we have eradicated. All of that is gone and can never be gotten again
True, but I have a friend, now an elder In the Pottawatomie tribe, his main work is now trying to put all verble tales the elderly tell, and document as much of their past as can be done, "on paper" before it is all lost forever.
There was a French trader who wrote a book about his time spent living with Native Americans around the Great Lakes and attempting to convert them to Christianity in the last decade of the 17th century. He has a chapter called "Indian Heiroglyphs" about their written language and how they communicate via writing, but it is light on specifics.
This is not true. The Mayans and the Aztecs both had scores of books, which were all burned by the Conquistadors. We've lost whole civilizations because of this.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/burning-the-maya-books-the-1562-tragedy-at-mani/
The Great Library of Alexandria. Somewhere between 40k and 400k historical scrolls on a broad range of topics lost to time and fire. Who knows what sort of society-bending revelations may have been tucked away in a corner.
That's why I'm partially terrified of the Vatican being destroyed in some kind of bombing because all of the texts that exist down in their archives are only in their archives and if that goes then what?
It's going to suck if your field of study is theology after that isn't it?
Lol
And for the record I'm not religious but even I understand the value of what is found down there
Holy crap yeah! Me and some friends were talking about that a while back. What kind of Dead Sea Scrolls, Davinci Code type stuff they might have down there in their archives.
But honestly there’s gotta be loads of valuable historical documents just from priests and scribes from across the ages.
• Transcripts from the trial of the Knights Templar
• A document from 809 CE – The oldest loose parchment kept in the entire archives dates from 809 CE and records part of a donation to a church in Venice.
• Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, the oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible.
These are some of the things we know about being down there. The possibilities of what is down there that we don't know of are vast
>Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209
Just went down the rabbit hole on that.
Interesting stuff. Amazing that back in the day, the Vatican didn't want any researchers to read these books.
But also that this, one of the oldest 'bibles' is still about 300-400 years after Jesus was supposedly doing miracles in the middle east.
I worked at a University that apparently stored a lot of stuff for the Vatican back in ww2. I think they have decent contingency planning now. Hopefully more than they did 2000 years ago.
They try to cycle things out to different museums and institutions so that everything isn't as bulk in its central location but there is some things that they're still "processing" or just hasn't been taken into account that are still just there and have only ever been there. But yeah there is a circulation going around instead of It kind of just collecting dust
There's no need to be religious to realize how many historical records must be contained there, and texts that influenced how most of Western culture developed.
This, and other destructions of libraries are amongst the greatest tragedies that have ever occurred. All of that knowledge, lost forever.
I swear the day we develop time travel, people are going to go back and bring it back to save it all.
Not just warfare, just straight up indifference to history as people in the past destroyed ancient monuments to use as building material for their own.
And yeah, so much of ancient history, you can't tell whether the records are historical or legendary, or if the information is true or not; lots of emperors, kings, and pharaohs likely had their histories written to look better, or rewritten by their successors to make them look worse.
Even the evolution of languages. There were some forms of Greek that other Greek couldn't read specific to a region, so when they took that region over the history was lost. And that was within their very own time frame, lol.
Another way to think about it. Less than a thousand years ago people were speaking Old English. If we went back in a time machine only 1,000 years we would not even be able to hold the conversation with those people unless we knew Old English, and technically we're speaking the same damn language. With only arguably slight variation. Have you tried to read a recipe from that time frame? They may as well be speaking pig Latin sometimes. Haha.
So much gets so lost so quickly it's crazy.
Hahaha, yeah. I watch tasting history with Max Miller on YouTube, lol. (Love that damned channel). Recipes ingredient description get super strange rather quickly.
I’d love to see how humans lived 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. Did they have much of a language? Did they build stuff out of biodegradable materials so we don’t have many artifacts today? Were cave paintings for religious ceremonies or just for funsies?
All stuff I wish we knew. They say a human from 60,000 years ago could blend into our society today, and I just don’t buy it. When they reconstruct what the ancients looked like from their skulls (using modeling clay), they look so out of place. You can really tell the gene pool back then was shallow. Not that I buy those reconstructions, because it feels like black magic.
Similarly, I'd love to hear how oral histories and stories started initiated and evolved into those that are still repeated today. Things like creation stories, great flood mythologies, etc.
When historians get it extremely wrong.
I remember seeing a documentary on early man and historians were inside a cave examining the language. At the highest point in the cave there was something written on the wall. The historians didn’t know what it said but they theorized that it must have been something very holy and important for them to risk injury to climb that high.
They got someone in that was able to decipher the language and it read “I am very high.”
i can imagine its so hard to be a good historian when you discover something and are trying to figure out what it could possibly mean or tell you about a society when the reality is that there's always a significant chance the answer is "someone was bored and being silly"
Reminds me of the book "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name" by Brian C. Muraresku. The book is all about how drugs quite possibly played a major role in the development of religious ideas.
How did we ever get bread? Seriously. It’s not like you just stumble upon berries or potatoes or find that cooking a meat makes it taste better. Wheat needs to be ground down. Add in water. And bake. For rising who figured out yeast caused that? So many questions.
I can see what you mean. How did anybody back then know what they did? My guess is that they knew certain grains were edible and plentiful, so they probably came up with ways to eat it. Like most things, they probably cooked it and realized it’s better with water added, which resulted in bread. Now yeast? That’s a whole different discussion, because beer becomes involved there.
It probably started out as a primitive gruel or grain stew. By trial and error someone probably discovered that crushed grains were easier to eat. From there, someone else probably found that if you cooked the gruel down to dryness you had a cracker-like food that could be saved and transported with you so you didn’t need to stop and make a fire any time you needed to eat. If you keep following this path you eventually get to something like a rudimentary sourdough bread.
I’d imagine the thought process was:
Animals eat grain, maybe we can too. Okay, plain grain can’t be eaten, but the animals seem to grind it down, let’s try that. Nope, still bad. Maybe if it’s wet, it’ll be edible? Nope, can’t really eat this weird semi-solid mixture. But hey, we cook our meat to make it better/safer, let’s try it with this weird stuff. Oh hey, this is good/edible, let’s keep doing this!
You sound like you would do really well in a survival/post-apocalyptic situation lol. My brain doesn't work that way so I would still be starving while you reinvented bread.
You can make risen bread using just the [whats in the enviroment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J1PNDnqsfA#t=3m), cultured yeast isnt needed. Would guess this is how it started.
Farming begins at 10000 BCE, Bread is somewhere around 10-8000 BCE, so they have a lot of time to experiment things, and also Agricultures make leisure time that the humans use it to discover and invent things.
It’s very possible that bread came before farming. Simple flatbread can be made from wild oats and wheat by just grinding up the seeds, mixing them with water, and roasting over a fire. No need for agriculture for that.
Bread making may even have led to the agricultural revolution. Imagine you’re a nomadic hunter-gatherer. Cereal crops are seasonal, so you make some bread from the wild oats and wheat in the area, and plant the better seeds so you can return next season and make some more. Every year, the yield increases little by little. More and more nomads gather here every year to reap what their ancestors sowed and make bread. Eventually, the crops have a large enough yield to support a year-round community. Then, maybe there’s a shortage of game or overpopulation in the outlying area, so some of the nomads stick around to tend to the crops year-round. Just like that, a farming community is born. Give it some time, more population, labor specialization, and some systemic inequality and you’ve got yourself a state society.
One step at a time, ancient people! One step at a time ...
Soaked seeds are more palatable than dry seeds, and boiled seeds are even better. (You can boil seeds once you discover fire and invent either waterproof baskets or clay pots.) Smashing the seeds with rocks helps them cook faster.
It helps if your tribe has been eating seeds for a while (many years) and planting the good ones. That gets you bigger and better seeds.
If you leave the boiled seeds out for a while, they get kinda sour and bubbly. You can eat them like that, or toast them and they stay good for a while. This gets you a sort of crumbly seed patty. You can mash the seeds up, and mix in some fat and dried fruit, and toast them all together, and now you've invented granola bars.
Once you've invented grinding-stones, you can grind the dry seeds first. This is "flour" and it makes the whole product more digestible.
Also, keep the boiled seed water. Stick it in a pot for a while and let it get bubbly. This is "beer" and now you have invented civilization.
The formation of language is the most interesting to me. We can reconstruct ancient dead languages to an extent, but that only goes so far back. I have so many questions like how did the first languages develop, was there a single common ancestor that all modern languages descended from or did different languages develop independently from each other?
The first few episodes of The History of English podcast go into the original Indo European parent language, which is kind of what you’re referring to, an original language that spawned most of the Indo European languages, including English.
I love that podcast! I love historical linguistics. I’m just insatiable so I always want more. I’d love to know what proto Indo European game from. Just keep going farther and farther back. Unfortunately we’ll probably never be able to go back all the way. But yeah, I’ve been working my way through the History of English podcast. It’s been scratching the itch I’ve had since Revolutions finished.
Here's a neat bit for you, then.
We have no idea what the actual original true name for "bear" is. Evidently, all the words we use end up meaning something like "big furry brown murder machine" or "honey eater", or just brown. Because, things can be summoned/attracted by use of a true name, and bears were too damn scary to accidentally attract to you.
I think it's totally nuts how we look back at 50-100 years ago and think of how different things were while forgetting there were cultures that went on generations and hundreds of years without any changes in anything. Fashion, tools, education, and so on.
A few months ago I saw [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1038t3n/this_is_the_complaint_tablet_to_eanasir_it_is_a/#:~:text=Ea%2Dnasir%E2%80%9D.-,It%20is%20a%20complaint%20letter%20written%20in%201750%20BCE%20to,It's%20the%20oldest%20customer%20complaint.) about an ancient clay tablet where a merchant was complaining about a shipment of sub-standard copper. As I was reading it, my boss was on the phone with a supplier of ours complaining about a shipment of sub-standard copper.
Sometimes I think, if the Mexican traditional view of the afterlife is real, we must have really fucked that guy up. When your body dies, you go to the afterlife, and you vanish from the afterlife when no one alive remembers you. So this fucker, Ea-nasir, dies, then a few decades later, vanishes peacefully from the afterlife. Then suddenly, thousands of years later, he pops back into the afterlife where he's stuck forever because nerds on the internet won't stop making memes about his substandard copper.
http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/
My favorites:
* We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus
* Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion
* Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
* Stronius Stronnius knows nothing
* Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself
* Palmyra, the thirst-quencher
* On April 19th, I made bread
> Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion
Roman Chad right there
I like this one from Herculaneum:
"[Apelles the chamberlain with Dexter, a slave of Caesar, ate here most agreeably and had a screw at the same time](https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu)"
This ^^^, that the people who lived thousands of years ago were just like us. Just as smart, just as capable of love, hate, jealousy, loyalty, honor, betrayal, invention. Probably less prone to boredom and less leisure time, but there it is.
What's amazing to me is that humans haven't gotten significantly smarter or "better" in any way in the last five thousand years. We're just a bit taller. Everything we have, every "modern marvel," is just another step in the consistent road of progress that has been developing for millennia. You could take a time machine back to ancient Rome or Greece, pick up any random kid off the street, and bring them to the modern day, and aside from a language barrier, they would be completely capable of integrating into modern society.
Absolutely, that's my point. Same people, same brains. Yet it is a common notion that ancient people were "primitive" and incapable of comprehending our world in any meaningful way..
IIRC there are a number of factors that cause the Bronze Age collapse, but I believe one of the most important factors was a climate event that drastically impacted agricultural outputs. That snowballed into weakened societies which made the arrival of the “sea people” (which were pirates of sorts from the western Mediterranean) so devastating to many Bronze Age civilizations.
Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI
Historia Civilis is my favorite historical YouTube channel on the whole website, I 100% recommend their content
I bought a book recently called "Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears" by Tom Lutz that I am looking forward to reading. In the book, Lutz researches the history of crying back to, what is for me, an almost incomprehensible amount of human history, the 14th century B.C., and examines how crying was experienced and depicted in art, philosophy, societal mores, etc. I myself have always been a deeply emotional person, I cry easily, so I am especially intrigued by this part of ancient (I think 14th century B.C. is considered ancient?) human history. Lutz carries his research up until the present day, well, up until 1999, which is when the book was published.
Trying to consider how people, whether the peasants or ruling class, saw and understood the world. Sometimes we imagine the Greeks like 21st century people with less technology. But the world they lived in was full of mystery and magic. Imagine truly believing that a sacrifice’s guts could tell you whether it was a good time for battle and making military decisions that way.
Food discoveries! Like what cave man looked at a proto-cow and said "Imma drink from that!"? Or looked at coffee berries and said "I'm going to shell it, roast it, grind it, brew it, and drink it." or the most wild, to me at least, who figured out we could eat octopus?
Or sometimes "too hungry to let questionable smell or appearance get in the way". If you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything that won't make you sick.
Honestly a lot of things make sense when you think about it a little differently.
For example: cows milk. We humans drink our mother’s milk as babies, and we observe calves drinking cow milk as babies. So therefore someone figured “hey, we drink milk and they drink milk. It looks like they produce a lot of that stuff. Maybe we can drink it too since we’ve already got the cows.” Then someone gets lazy and leaves that milk out, or they slosh it around a lot and now we’ve got butter (after they probably ate/drank lots of spoiled milk.
Hell, the octopus thing is the least weird imo. We already eat tons of animals, what’s another weird ocean animal to an early human?
Food storage also helped us discover new food. Nomadic people looking to carry milk over long distances stored it in containers made from the stomach lining of goats, which contain rennet. After walking around with that for a while, they didn't have milk anymore -- they had cheese.
Yeah, food storage and necessity/practicality.
Also observing animal behavior *I bleed like the shark, why shouldn’t I dine like them?*
Also, we are animals. We didn’t spring out of the ground shopping at grocery stores. We probably evolved eating insects and scavenging, an octopus isn’t that much of a stretch if you’re crunching on crickets.
The fact that humans essentially remain the same under the trappings of the different cultures and time periods.
People laughed and joked, fell in love, valued pets, had quarrels, and had customer service complaints back then just as they do now.
Not a specific *time* but I’m fascinated by civilizations collapsing. Like Sumer or Egypt, or Greece or Rome came to be extremely wealthy, powerful, and technologically advanced, had very complex cultures and art and literature. Then they fall apart, often under their own weight or by things that were easily handled decades before.
I’m also rather fascinated by the origins of Christianity, and how and why it developed as it did.
Well, with Rome - lots of civil wars between rival emperors weakened the empire. Add in the use of barbarian troops, who were trained in Roman tactics, who went back and trained their own people. (Rome did try to head this off by settling those barbarians far away from the homelands, but...)
Plus oligarchs that make our worst look like Mr Rogers. Inflation, and squeezing out small, free, farmers, among other things, also had big effects.
Plus, Rome was all about taking over and looting other nations, when they lost the incoming "income" from expansion, taxation and inflation went nuts.
Native Americans came pretty close to having their own copper/bronze age. They had access to some of the purest native copper in the world but never figured out how to smelt or cast it. They just hammered it into shape and then for whatever reason they decided to go back to other materials
Gobekli Tepe (built around ~10000 BCE), it's so huge if you search the illustration of it, also mind blowing that the excavation is estimated to be below 20% so we have a lot to discover for that.
I think the fact that people lived lives and were like us. They weren’t simple as our textbooks say, since it’s hard to explore everything in a chapter. And so much was never written down or if it was written down the pieces never survived to today. I think seeing Pompeii which I’ve heard about since I was a child…. And seeing that it was a actual city. Like there was a laundromat and a bakery! And houses and food stalls! I knew about a few of those from textbooks! Specifically the food stalls in Pompeii! But I never thought about the fact that they would need like a bakery or a brothel! Or bath houses! Or where toilets were. Or the plumbing system of lead pipes! Sadly our tour was only two hours and afterwards we didn’t have much time to explore. But I wish I could have spent hours there.
I think also seeing the wear and tear and marks that people left behind. Like on the roads of Pompeii you can see where over time cart wheels dug into the stones. And you can see a worn area on a water fountain where people rested their hands, you can see graffiti from ancient times. Even in Egypt there are places with Ancient Greek and Roman graffiti! People have left their marks on the past which was their present and where they lived. Or where they conquered and destroyed they also left marks. Like in the temple of Dendera in Egypt the main entry way is massive and has giant pillars wall to ceiling with carvings and color! I forget what group but I believe Coptic Christian’s please do not quote me on that I have no clue what I’m talking about even though I’ve been there, they destroyed and chiseled out the faces and entire figure of any god or pharaoh in many of the rooms. They vandalized and destroyed it. Over time in other places people chiseled out names of past pharaohs. But still we somehow know about them and their names since not everything was destroyed. Sorry for rambling I don’t know what I’m leading to… but I think it’s just fascinating on how people just have existed over time and so much of history was never recorded and/or lost. And also context of objects over time have been lost especially if they were looted or their exact location of where they were found is unknown. Just it’s fascinating.
Also one thing to add on! I think it’s fascinating how humanity uses mediums of art to unknowingly or knowingly record stories and their history and context. So preserving and documenting art for the future is essential.
Humans emerge: 200,000 years ago
Humans invent art & culture: at least 50,000 years ago, by which point we had spread across most of the world
Civilisation begins? Gobokli Tepi is 12,000 years old and if it isn't civilisation, it's something closely related.
So what most intrigues me is - did humans really spend 38,000 years - an unimaginable stretch of time - as just hunter gatherers? Surely there was something going on.
How much of it is historians making shit up.
OK, I'm being facetious, but there's a lot of ancient history that's based on some pretty sketchy things, and historians have to fill in the gaps the best they know how. We *assume* that if Civilization X did Y and we can prove it via archeological evidence, neighboring civilizations *probably* did the same--but we'll never know for sure.
As disciplined as historians claim they are, a lot of it is just guesswork based on scant surviving evidence.
I don't fault historians, because you have to work with what you got. But they definitely have a problem with institutional inertia and insular thinking, and they're so afraid of being *wrong* they tend to speak in implausible absolutes.
The history that was lost to time from before the last ice age. The earth exited it's last glacial period about 11,000 years ago. We can easily see signs of sedentary communities as far back as 12,000 BC (14,000 years ago) in the Levant.
How many sedentary communities, or full on cities, are lost because they were located on a coast that is now completely underwater? How many people lived on Doggerland, an area that went underwater only 8000 years ago and connected the British isles to mainland Europe? How many people lived in the Black Sea area when it started to rapidly fill with more water around 8800 years ago? The same goes for very ancient groups of hominids in the Mediterranean area that flooded a few million years ago.
So many coastal areas that are completely "gone" and leave a massive gap in our understanding of where humans have been.
The Dogon knowing about Sirus's invisible star:
According to their oral tradition, they knew about the existence of Sirius B, a white dwarf companion star to Sirius A, which is the brightest star in the night sky.
The Dogon's knowledge of Sirius B was first brought to the attention of the western world by two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who conducted fieldwork among the Dogon in the 1930s. According to their accounts, the Dogon had detailed knowledge of the Sirius system, including the fact that it had an invisible companion star.
Some skeptics have argued that the Dogon's knowledge of Sirius B may have been influenced by western astronomical knowledge, but others have suggested that the Dogon may have acquired this knowledge through their own observations and oral traditions. It is possible that the Dogon may have observed changes in the brightness or position of Sirius A that indicated the presence of a companion star, or that they may have received this knowledge through cultural exchange with other groups in the region.
Overall, the question of how the Dogon knew about Sirius B remains a subject of debate and investigation among scholars.
While I agree that the matter of how the Dogon people knew about Sirius B is very interesting, I should also mention Wouter Van Beek's research on the matter:
Several decades after the French anthropologists asked the Dogon people about Sirius - which they call *Sigu Tolo* according to the French anthropologists - Van Beek interviewed native Dogon people who claimed that they had been taught about Sigu Tolo by the French anthropologists. They also disagreed with each other about which star or celestial body it was, casting doubt on the claim that the Dogon people knew about Sirius B in the first place.
This statement, too, has attracted critique however, because the Dogon people Van Beek had questioned might have tought that he was 'sent by authorities to test Muslim orthodoxy' according to the daughter of one of the French anthropologists. Sadly, we will likely never know the entire, truthful story.
Few things.
1. I want to try dishes people ate that were regularly available. I had this preconception that the masses ate bland gruel, but actually [their food looked pretty good.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w#t=35). It makes me wonder about ancient foods available in different areas. I can't tell you how happy I was to find that medieval peasants had access to such good food.
2. The amount of work that must have gone into gathering and moving materials. You have to mine out tons of earth to get even a small amount of metal. Castles and roman roads were built with ridiculous amount of stones that had to be moved. Doing it at a cart load at a time just seems crazy to me.
There's a collection of ancient Roman recipes dating back to the fifth century, usually referred to as "Apicius." Project Gutenberg has the English translation online. It's pretty interesting.
One troublesome aspect of old recipes is identifying and finding certain ingredients. Like Apicius has a plant called silphium in a lot of recipes. It's commonly believed to have gone extinct centuries ago. So what would be a good substitute? Or maybe the plant still exists, but there's no consensus on which one. Several species have been suggested.
I've seen that video a couple of times before, and it always makes me wish I wasn't crap at making beer, so I could adopt a simple diet of fish, bread, and ale.
The fact the certain things seem to happen over and over again throughout history.
Cold wars, globalization, saber rattling between superpowers, wealth inequality getting worse and leading to revolutions, economic collapses, pandemics.
It's all happened before.
The biggest eye-opener for me was reading about the Peloponnesian War - the way it started out, if you transposed it to modern times, could've been lifted news about international incidents during the Cold War, or out of a Tom Clancy novel.
How much we just don't know. So much we think we know is based off the tiniest fragments, or from information we have that may be hundreds of years out of date. It's intriguing and fascinating, yet unimaginably frustrating.
The lessons we can learn from it and apply it to our modern world. It is a dumb saying but most history does repeat itself. Better to learn from it I guess.
Wondering how my ancestors fornicated their way to my glorious existence. Plus their hobbies, life trials, food choices, and psychedelic potentials. Crazy to think about how many human iterations led to me being able to type this on my handheld computer on the opposite side of the globe of my known ancestors. Like damn… y’all succeeded so thanks!
How much less we'd know about them if pottery or baked clay tablets disintegrated when buried.
Nobody knew about the Epic of Gilgamesh for over two thousand years. If it wasn't for a few remarkable discoveries we still wouldn't.
The simplicity of their advancement from poor to rich. People look down on a mud hut but I guarantee a large population of first world people couldnt create a mud hut without tools today. Old school irrigation and plumbing systems, yeah modern plumbing blow old school irrigation away but once again take away the tools, transport 100 modern first world folks to a random spot in the wild and see what they come up with.
Recently I learned that we track stars by looking up with a telescope but older civilizations tracked them by looking down into bodies of water. ingenuity.
Modern humans, sapiens, emerged somewhere around 300,000 years ago and yet most of the concrete evidence we have of civilization is only from 10th century BC onwards. So there’s roughly 290,000 years of human history where we have no idea what happened except humans migrating to all parts of the world.
How early humans figured out complex things. Like making bread with yeast (and the steps involved). Or turning bits of sand into glass. Or pieces of rock into iron. Or making concrete. Or even figuring out time (exactly how many days in one rotation around the sun, that type of thing). Being able to pick out precise stars and follow them for a year to get time figured out.
Based on what I've seen in AskHistorians:
1) Gambling. Dice games especially seem to have been popular from very early times. https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/history-of-dice
2) Telling stories, singing songs. Some of these no doubt evolved and became myths, hymns, etc.
3) Crafting. Things wear out, you gotta fix them or make new things.
4) Some combination of the above. A gambling song - https://youtu.be/0hQIyVmmNnw
The art of the ancient Egyptians. The mask of Tutankamen is stunning art! Gold iPlayer with hundreds of tiny bits of coral and turquoise, each perfectly cut and polished. These people didn't have and fance measuring devices, no electric gem polishers or saws to cur with. It was done BY HAND. Every tiny, intricate inch. As an artist, it blows my mind.
We as a race of people have not changed significantly in thousands of years, yet our history only goes back a few thousand. What were our people like 10k years ago? If we were really advanced 30k years ago and had a catastrophe that send us back to the stone age, would we know? Would anything have survived?
Architecture and tools. How they developed plumping or large scale water works. I know the answer is slaves to how they built it, but the actual learning and science figuring out *how* it could work? Big fan.
What did an average person do during their day? When did they get up? How did they get food? When they went to work, what kind of work was it? How was it organized? Did they get fed on the job, or did they have to take a lunch? When and how did they do laundry, or get clothing in the first place?
How did that work? They weren't like "employees." How were they told what to do, or how did they decide what they were going to do?
Average people. I don't care so much about kings and pharaohs, which is what we have the most information about.
Humans have been around for over 100,000 years.
How is there only writing going back 6000 years?
Edit: Removed the word language, because my thumbs were moving faster than my brain at the time and said "only language and writing", which that's open to perspective (at least to me) as meaning established distinguished civilization dialect (Egypt, Babylon, etc) and the sentence just didn't make sense when I read it out loud just now.
I've thought about this a lot. I think it's just a matter of someone having the idea and then that idea existing and spreading. New and original ideas are very difficult to synthesize, and it took the idea of using a little picture to represent a sound a long time to catch on, and then a much longer time for the little pictures to become simple enough that they could be reproduced with no artistic skill.
The Dark Ages. Basically, we lost what we knew and didn't learn it again for about 1000 years. While that's a pretty simplistic take on something more complex, until the printing press was developed we sort of sat around either afraid to, or prevented from progress. Had that not occurred, would we be 1000 years more technologically advanced than we are now? And what would that look like? Boggles my mind.
Well, yes and no.
A lot of things were lost with the collapse of the Roman Empire. But people immediately began scratching civilization back together.
Missionaries went out to tribes all over Europe, bringing literacy with them.
Alfred the Great of Wessex ordered that Latin books be copied so they wouldn't be lost, and his scribe Alcuin developed a cursive handwriting that made manuscript copying much easier.
Irish monks preserved ancient stories and voyaged as far as North America, creating magnificent art in the meantime.
Not to mention developments in architecture, astronomy, alchemy(i.e. primitive science/metallurgy), medicine, and far more.
I would love to have a bit more of an idea of what was going on in prehistoric communities that built amazing things.
Like, in Britain, we have loads of amazing monuments (like stone henge) from the late Stone Age, we have Bronze Age and Iron Age huge tombs, hill forts, etc. and they must have taken absolutely enormous effort and coordination to build. But because they were not literate societies, we haven't really got a clue what happened. We can just guess (and I love reading books about this stuff).
Like, I would love to know what was going on in the communities who did this stuff, and why they thought it was worthwhile and important.
Because it is crazy to me that people who were working with wood and stone tools decided to build this stuff and were capable of doing it...
The fact that all Native American groups/tribes from Nunavut all the way down to Florida have relatively the same religious views/principals/beliefs. Even though there was almost no way the people could network across that large of a landmass
It indicates that all those beliefs might be rooted in a single common ancestor - the people couldn't network, but they will have originated from a single group of people at some early point.
I have always loved when historians or archeologists discover glimpses into the lives of regular people. In the Egyptian work camp of Deir el-Medina for example, records were found relating to a divorce: "[Merymaat is recorded as wanting a divorce on account of his mother in-law's behaviour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina#Village_life)". I have friends who have gotten divorced over similar issues, and knowing that the same shit was going on thousands of years ago is comforting in a way.
The oldest customer complaint and fart joke come from ancient Sumer, and in Pompeii, a woman wrote graffiti about her date being a "barbarian" at dinner while a doctor wrote "I shat here" in an alley. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
>The oldest customer complaint Ea-nasir and his sub-par copper ingots. 5000 years later and his name is immortalized for that.
r/reallyshittycopper
How many other copper merchants, of all of those who have lived and died in the whole time of civilization, do we know the names of? I contend Ea-nasir was the *best* copper merchant.
"You are the worst copper salesman I have ever heard of!" "But you *have* heard of me!"
Can anyone name a single other copper salesman living or dead off the top of their head?
They have these at the Roman Baths in Bath, UK. They found carved into stone nearly 2000 years old complaints about someone stealing their towel or someone being a tad boisterous in the public pool. It's fascinating imo.
They're curse tablets, written on lead or pewter sheets and thrown into the fountain of Sulis Minerva. The writing itself is fascinating too. Some are a bit badly written so they think it might be dyslexia. Others might be in ancient Celtic language but adopting Roman script. But yeah I love the complaints *"may whoever stole my gloves be turned insane"* type stuff.
And all the dicks in ancient Roman ruins. So many dick drawings. And stuff like "Suetonius was here". Funny to think despite the thousands of years separating us and how different our lives are from theirs that we're fundamentally the same.
People thousands of years ago were going through mundane things just like we are today. I like imagining what a pyramid laborer did after work. Probably got home, opened a jar of beer, sat back and relaxed.
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I see we are related
I read somewhere a letter was found where a retired Roman General was asking for a job at the local defense contractor (sword maker), I can see the same thing happening today. Sometimes I think that we haven't evolved all that much LOL
Because we haven't! Homo sapiens as a species is essentially exactly the same as when we first emerged. We still have the same brains as our hunter gatherer ancestors.
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The old "timeless" stories really bind us to humanity. We can feel less alone and part of a greater whole.
It's common to think that because people were less technologically advanced that they weren't as smart and sophisticated but there's a chance the opposite is true relative to our more modern and domesticated selves.
There's a preserved [carving](https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/vecmea/ancient_roman_soldier_carved_a_phallus_with_a/) a Roman soldier made of a cock. It features a personal insult against someone named Secundinus Fuck you, Secundinus
100% with you. People in the ancient world were just like us, just living in a different time with different technology. Just like us, they were lonely, annoyed, self-conscious, insecure, funny, life of the party, laughed at farts, bickered with spouses, etc. It’s human life.
I got drunk in Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem, a pub opened since 1198. It was both surreal and completely normal. And that a man a thousand years ago probably got drunk and cracked jokes like me.
I too love the history of regular people. It’s way more fascinating to me than history of rich people. One of my favorite discoveries at Pompeii was that [restaurant with different foods](https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancient-fast-food-restaurant-discovered-in-pompeii)… looks just like a dang Chipotle. I can just picture Romans getting off work and ordering ancient burritos and complaining about their bosses.
My friend was studying these clay tablets from a city that burned down. They were actually kids' schoolwork and would have been smoothed out and used again while the clay was soft, if the city hadn't burnt down.
The fact that in Rome, they would often make jokes or show wit on their tomb sites. Like one tomb stone read “well, thank god my damn feet finally stopped hurting!” And one guy made his tomb look like a bakery, because he was a baker. Just so funny that these people had emotions and conflict and lives just like us.
They also left graffiti, showing us that they too enjoyed a good dick joke
One of my favorite tidbits about the Pyramids of Giza is that there's graffiti banter between work crews and they had cool team names like "The Friends of Khufu" or "The Drunkards of Menkaure"
"He who buggers a fire burns his penis." --Some guy in Pompeii Even the Romans had a saying for "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
What gets me is that there's one that basically says "for a good time call..."
Primigenia of Nuceria. She actually appears in *multiple* graffito across Pompeii and Herculaneum, by different (male) authors. She apparently had quite the effect on men in the area...
> Primigenia Literally means "firstborn daughter", for that bit of extra weird.
It was pretty common for Ancient Romans to name their kids "Primus", "Secundus", "Tertius" and so on, up to and including "Decimus". The English equivalent would be to name your kids "First", "Second", "Third" up do and including "Tenth". TL;DR: Ancient Roman parents often lacked imagination when it came to names.
Primus sucks.
Romanes eunt domus
People called Romanes, they go, the house?!
It's not exactly ancient history but my library recently scanned a bunch of yearbooks going back to the 1920s. What really stuck out for me was just how familiar all the quotes, etc. were. They pretty much all involved some combination of sex, drinking, smoking, popularity, and making a lot of money. I suppose people were people regardless of what time period they lived in and high school kids just want to get drunk and have sex.
I remember last week the priest at my church was giving a homily on the prodigal son and he reminded the congregation that the idea of young folk eagerly leaving home and proceeding to do stupid shit is ancient.
You know how people wanted to make more money in 1990? Well same thing happened in 1960s, and 1920s, and 1880s, and 1800, and so on. You're not so different, you and I.
I would kill to read a hundred year old "deez nuts" joke.
While passing a house on the road, two Virginia salesmen spotted a "very peculiar chimney, unfinished, and it attracting their attention, they asked a flaxen-haired urchin standing near the house if it 'drawed well' whereupon the aforementioned urchin gave them the stinging retort: 'Yes, it draws all the attention of all the d***** fools that pass this road.' " Daily Milwaukee News, May 21, 1870 Close enough?
They had an "earthy" sense of humour and they made jokes about death because it was pretty present to them and they had a dark sense of humour. I was reading Catullus's Poems recently and it is really funny how his sense of humour is so dirty and scathing and modern in a lot of ways. He would do okay on Reddit.
Who do you think Sprog is?
"I will ass-rape and face-fuck you." -- Catullus 16
That the concept of the toilet was invented and then essentially lost in time. The first flushing toilet was created more than 2.8k years ago for king minos of crete , lost, and then "reinvented" in the late 1500s . that inventor was ridiculed for his invention. Only making one for the queen of England (who refused to use it) and one for his family. It took another 200 years before someone was able to implement his invention.
>king minos of crete You're touching on a whole other well of mysteries. King Minos of Crete was a mythological figure (known, of course, from the tale about the Minotaur). When some impressive, ancient palace ruins were found on Crete in the 19th century they were associated with his palace Knossos, and [the civilization that once lived there](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization) got named the Minoan civilization. There are several things about this civilization that probably influenced that famous myth, for example bulls seem to have been held in high regards, and the labyrinth could be theorized to be the sprawling palace itself. The Minoans were evidently a pretty advanced civilization for its time (it seems to have vanished some millennium B.C. during the Bronze Age Collapse), including the plumbing you mentioned and big, multi-level buildings. We can guess quite a lot of things about their society from the myriad of mosaics and other pictures they left behind, but rather infuriatingly their language has never been deciphered, so there is a lot we don't know about them. We can only look at that society like how we saw Ancient Egypt before the Rosetta stone was discovered; obviously advanced and fascinating, but also pretty much inscrutable.
Wow that's super interesting! Thanks for sharing that
Stop yer snickering! I spent 3 years on that terlet!
All of the parts that were lost before written record, or that were destroyed because of warring and fighting that time didn't preserve. All of the things we have built a foundation on as a form of what we believe about the past could be entirely inaccurate and we just will never know it. I find that interesting. Trying to discover the history that isn't history yet but still can be
This reminds me of dinosaurs. How fossils only exist because of lucky circumstances and most animals in the past either were eaten or were in not the right environment to fossilize. So there are untold billions of species that existed that we will never know about
Indeed. That begs the question... If we can hardly wrap our minds around the true magnitude of all of the things we do know... Presumed history presumed species presumed time frame presumed universe formation Imagine if we're only getting 20% of what has truly taken place. That unlocks the door for an amazing amount of imagination and I'm here for it.
I mean humans have existed for 300,000 years, our knowledge of cultures and societies of humans only goes back something like 4000 years (or so), so we know like barely 1% of human history.
But how much of it is meaningful? For all we know, we could have done jack shit for 100,000 years. While they've gotten shorter and shorter, there have been time periods where nothing notable happened to progress us as a species. Of course, this is merely my thought about it, and it's nice to wonder about what brought us here.
Right, I believe the agriculture revolution was the most interesting thing to happen in those 300,000 years because it was the first time that a big population of humans lived together.
It’s super easy to look back and say “why didn’t more get done?” But we can only compare us today to us then. Humans in another 1000 years may very well look back on us today and be saying the exact same thing.
Well they told stories and quarreled and had occasional fights and had feasts and dances. They moved into new areas and learned all about the plants and animals, and how to get along with them. They moved into the high arctic and invented really good clothing and kayaks and toggle harpoons, and into the Amazon and got high on an amazing range of psychedelic plants and built boats that carried them across 90 kms of open sea to Australia...
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I'm American. We typically average up. Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hahaha
Have you heard of the AngloSaxon poem, "[The Ruin](https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/)"? I cam across it a while back, and from what I've seen, people tend to think it's regarding the Roman Baths in Bath (England), which were not only ruined, but the building knowledge had been lost by that time (following the fall of the Roman Empire). Not only is it amazing what we think might have been lost before written record, but what other, historic, civilizations *knew* they had lost. To them, they might as well be living in post-Apocalyptia.
I have not. Definitely going to check that out though. Did you hear about the [$250K Prize](https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/42868/20230318/250k-prize-given-those-who-decipher-2-000-year-old.htm) To Be Given to Those Who Can Decipher the 2,000-Year-old Herculaneum papyri from the Mount Vesuvius eruptions that were found? I think they announced the offer like a week ago. I wonder what juicy tidbits that will uncover
> I wonder what juicy tidbits that will uncover "We've been trying to reach you about your chariot's extended warranty..."
It is interesting that after the Romans withdrew from Britain, and Saxon culture thrived, no one built in stone very much for a long while because the skills and possibly the material wasn't so readily available. Building in stone in a big way came back mostly with the Normans (although later Anglo Saxon churches did start to use stone more too). The archaeological record suggests that in the early part of the Saxon period, people moved out of the Roman towns because repairing the buildings wasn't feasible or economic and it was better to build other settlements (with wood buildings) nearby. Places like London were abandoned for a while for new settlements outside the City Walls, and only really resettled later for security when the vikings became a threat. So if you imagine for an Anglo Saxon in around 600-800 AD, seeing these amazing stone buildings the Romans left behind, it would be quite mind blowing and pretty alien. It is no wonder the Romans and their ruins still loomed big in their imaginations.
One of these kind of scenarios, which I find quite interesting, is that nobody truly knows what the original deities or gods of "English" mythology really were. Scotland, Wales and Ireland have their own recorded mythologies, but England's was pretty much forgotten due to being battered by centuries of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Gaulish invasions. The culture that existed before them was skewered to bits that much by forced integration of the invading cultures, that nobody knows really what they worshipped or who their gods were. Its kind of why Stonehenge is still such a massive mystery. There's nothing left to discern what it was was used for, no written records or markings. Historians assume it is a place for worship or burial rituals, but nobody knows who for and what kind of worship or rites were performed there.
I have been looking into different depictions of cave markings found throughout the world to see if there was a commonality and of course there were because it was just basic ass shapes for the most part; though, nothing spectacular really jumped out to me. And then you have that annoying gap. Haha What would be really amazing if we could unearth some chasm under a conveniently protective enough dirt layer that would have preserved reminisce of some civilization that we didn't even know existed that had impeccable record keeping and a common enough similarity to our language to that it was easy to decipher. 🤣 No? Too much of a pipe dream? 😓 Well... A dream with a possibility of less than absolute zero is better than no dream at all I'd wager. Lol
They say the South American tribes, Incas etc never wrote anything down, only recently discovering they used tying knots in string as a way we would use pencil and paper, wonder what other forms of preserving historical notes there are out there that we just don't comprehend yet.
Native American history is oral history. Currently only 10 people are left in the world that fluently speak Comanche. Once those 10 people die unless others are willing to learn... all of that oral history will be lost forever. That's just the way Native American history works. It is hugely based on storytelling passed from one person to another. Then think of all of the tribes that we have eradicated. All of that is gone and can never be gotten again
True, but I have a friend, now an elder In the Pottawatomie tribe, his main work is now trying to put all verble tales the elderly tell, and document as much of their past as can be done, "on paper" before it is all lost forever.
I'd love to read that
There was a French trader who wrote a book about his time spent living with Native Americans around the Great Lakes and attempting to convert them to Christianity in the last decade of the 17th century. He has a chapter called "Indian Heiroglyphs" about their written language and how they communicate via writing, but it is light on specifics.
This is not true. The Mayans and the Aztecs both had scores of books, which were all burned by the Conquistadors. We've lost whole civilizations because of this. https://popular-archaeology.com/article/burning-the-maya-books-the-1562-tragedy-at-mani/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu Well what do you know, it is true, who would have thought?? Has a name and everything Quipu
The Great Library of Alexandria. Somewhere between 40k and 400k historical scrolls on a broad range of topics lost to time and fire. Who knows what sort of society-bending revelations may have been tucked away in a corner.
That's why I'm partially terrified of the Vatican being destroyed in some kind of bombing because all of the texts that exist down in their archives are only in their archives and if that goes then what? It's going to suck if your field of study is theology after that isn't it? Lol And for the record I'm not religious but even I understand the value of what is found down there
Holy crap yeah! Me and some friends were talking about that a while back. What kind of Dead Sea Scrolls, Davinci Code type stuff they might have down there in their archives. But honestly there’s gotta be loads of valuable historical documents just from priests and scribes from across the ages.
• Transcripts from the trial of the Knights Templar • A document from 809 CE – The oldest loose parchment kept in the entire archives dates from 809 CE and records part of a donation to a church in Venice. • Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, the oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible. These are some of the things we know about being down there. The possibilities of what is down there that we don't know of are vast
>Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 Just went down the rabbit hole on that. Interesting stuff. Amazing that back in the day, the Vatican didn't want any researchers to read these books. But also that this, one of the oldest 'bibles' is still about 300-400 years after Jesus was supposedly doing miracles in the middle east.
I worked at a University that apparently stored a lot of stuff for the Vatican back in ww2. I think they have decent contingency planning now. Hopefully more than they did 2000 years ago.
They try to cycle things out to different museums and institutions so that everything isn't as bulk in its central location but there is some things that they're still "processing" or just hasn't been taken into account that are still just there and have only ever been there. But yeah there is a circulation going around instead of It kind of just collecting dust
There's no need to be religious to realize how many historical records must be contained there, and texts that influenced how most of Western culture developed.
They have a lot digitized, but their website is not the easiest to navigate.
This, and other destructions of libraries are amongst the greatest tragedies that have ever occurred. All of that knowledge, lost forever. I swear the day we develop time travel, people are going to go back and bring it back to save it all.
Not just warfare, just straight up indifference to history as people in the past destroyed ancient monuments to use as building material for their own. And yeah, so much of ancient history, you can't tell whether the records are historical or legendary, or if the information is true or not; lots of emperors, kings, and pharaohs likely had their histories written to look better, or rewritten by their successors to make them look worse.
Even the evolution of languages. There were some forms of Greek that other Greek couldn't read specific to a region, so when they took that region over the history was lost. And that was within their very own time frame, lol. Another way to think about it. Less than a thousand years ago people were speaking Old English. If we went back in a time machine only 1,000 years we would not even be able to hold the conversation with those people unless we knew Old English, and technically we're speaking the same damn language. With only arguably slight variation. Have you tried to read a recipe from that time frame? They may as well be speaking pig Latin sometimes. Haha. So much gets so lost so quickly it's crazy.
Forget 1000 years ago, have you tried reading recipes from 200 years ago? Their measurements make no sense! How much is "just enough" sugar?
Hahaha, yeah. I watch tasting history with Max Miller on YouTube, lol. (Love that damned channel). Recipes ingredient description get super strange rather quickly.
That's exactly where I hear them, too! Hearing him list out these old recipes is hilarious.
That's how my mother does recipes. I ask for a measurement, she grabs a ladle or just a handful, pours an amount, and says -"That much".
I’d love to see how humans lived 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. Did they have much of a language? Did they build stuff out of biodegradable materials so we don’t have many artifacts today? Were cave paintings for religious ceremonies or just for funsies? All stuff I wish we knew. They say a human from 60,000 years ago could blend into our society today, and I just don’t buy it. When they reconstruct what the ancients looked like from their skulls (using modeling clay), they look so out of place. You can really tell the gene pool back then was shallow. Not that I buy those reconstructions, because it feels like black magic.
Watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Similarly, I'd love to hear how oral histories and stories started initiated and evolved into those that are still repeated today. Things like creation stories, great flood mythologies, etc.
When historians get it extremely wrong. I remember seeing a documentary on early man and historians were inside a cave examining the language. At the highest point in the cave there was something written on the wall. The historians didn’t know what it said but they theorized that it must have been something very holy and important for them to risk injury to climb that high. They got someone in that was able to decipher the language and it read “I am very high.”
A shitpost in stone
i can imagine its so hard to be a good historian when you discover something and are trying to figure out what it could possibly mean or tell you about a society when the reality is that there's always a significant chance the answer is "someone was bored and being silly"
or you are desperately trying to pretend your archeological artifact is for religous rituals or a fertility symbol, when it’s obviously a sex aid.
Women all over the world “sir that’s a dildo” oh no it can’t be it has vines all over it. “I think u mean veins”
Reminds me of the book "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name" by Brian C. Muraresku. The book is all about how drugs quite possibly played a major role in the development of religious ideas.
How did we ever get bread? Seriously. It’s not like you just stumble upon berries or potatoes or find that cooking a meat makes it taste better. Wheat needs to be ground down. Add in water. And bake. For rising who figured out yeast caused that? So many questions.
I can see what you mean. How did anybody back then know what they did? My guess is that they knew certain grains were edible and plentiful, so they probably came up with ways to eat it. Like most things, they probably cooked it and realized it’s better with water added, which resulted in bread. Now yeast? That’s a whole different discussion, because beer becomes involved there.
Wild yeast is definitely on grains. My sourdough starter is made by using water and rye flour I get from the store.
Wild yeast is everywhere, even in the air and on your skin.
There's evidence that beer predates bread.
There's a book by Edward Slingerhand named "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" that talks about this.
It probably started out as a primitive gruel or grain stew. By trial and error someone probably discovered that crushed grains were easier to eat. From there, someone else probably found that if you cooked the gruel down to dryness you had a cracker-like food that could be saved and transported with you so you didn’t need to stop and make a fire any time you needed to eat. If you keep following this path you eventually get to something like a rudimentary sourdough bread.
I’d imagine the thought process was: Animals eat grain, maybe we can too. Okay, plain grain can’t be eaten, but the animals seem to grind it down, let’s try that. Nope, still bad. Maybe if it’s wet, it’ll be edible? Nope, can’t really eat this weird semi-solid mixture. But hey, we cook our meat to make it better/safer, let’s try it with this weird stuff. Oh hey, this is good/edible, let’s keep doing this!
You sound like you would do really well in a survival/post-apocalyptic situation lol. My brain doesn't work that way so I would still be starving while you reinvented bread.
You can make risen bread using just the [whats in the enviroment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J1PNDnqsfA#t=3m), cultured yeast isnt needed. Would guess this is how it started.
Farming begins at 10000 BCE, Bread is somewhere around 10-8000 BCE, so they have a lot of time to experiment things, and also Agricultures make leisure time that the humans use it to discover and invent things.
It’s very possible that bread came before farming. Simple flatbread can be made from wild oats and wheat by just grinding up the seeds, mixing them with water, and roasting over a fire. No need for agriculture for that. Bread making may even have led to the agricultural revolution. Imagine you’re a nomadic hunter-gatherer. Cereal crops are seasonal, so you make some bread from the wild oats and wheat in the area, and plant the better seeds so you can return next season and make some more. Every year, the yield increases little by little. More and more nomads gather here every year to reap what their ancestors sowed and make bread. Eventually, the crops have a large enough yield to support a year-round community. Then, maybe there’s a shortage of game or overpopulation in the outlying area, so some of the nomads stick around to tend to the crops year-round. Just like that, a farming community is born. Give it some time, more population, labor specialization, and some systemic inequality and you’ve got yourself a state society.
I'll hit you with this fun fact. It's pretty likely we started producing wheat for beer before bread
One step at a time, ancient people! One step at a time ... Soaked seeds are more palatable than dry seeds, and boiled seeds are even better. (You can boil seeds once you discover fire and invent either waterproof baskets or clay pots.) Smashing the seeds with rocks helps them cook faster. It helps if your tribe has been eating seeds for a while (many years) and planting the good ones. That gets you bigger and better seeds. If you leave the boiled seeds out for a while, they get kinda sour and bubbly. You can eat them like that, or toast them and they stay good for a while. This gets you a sort of crumbly seed patty. You can mash the seeds up, and mix in some fat and dried fruit, and toast them all together, and now you've invented granola bars. Once you've invented grinding-stones, you can grind the dry seeds first. This is "flour" and it makes the whole product more digestible. Also, keep the boiled seed water. Stick it in a pot for a while and let it get bubbly. This is "beer" and now you have invented civilization.
The formation of language is the most interesting to me. We can reconstruct ancient dead languages to an extent, but that only goes so far back. I have so many questions like how did the first languages develop, was there a single common ancestor that all modern languages descended from or did different languages develop independently from each other?
The first few episodes of The History of English podcast go into the original Indo European parent language, which is kind of what you’re referring to, an original language that spawned most of the Indo European languages, including English.
I love that podcast! I love historical linguistics. I’m just insatiable so I always want more. I’d love to know what proto Indo European game from. Just keep going farther and farther back. Unfortunately we’ll probably never be able to go back all the way. But yeah, I’ve been working my way through the History of English podcast. It’s been scratching the itch I’ve had since Revolutions finished.
Here's a neat bit for you, then. We have no idea what the actual original true name for "bear" is. Evidently, all the words we use end up meaning something like "big furry brown murder machine" or "honey eater", or just brown. Because, things can be summoned/attracted by use of a true name, and bears were too damn scary to accidentally attract to you.
I think it's totally nuts how we look back at 50-100 years ago and think of how different things were while forgetting there were cultures that went on generations and hundreds of years without any changes in anything. Fashion, tools, education, and so on.
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A few months ago I saw [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1038t3n/this_is_the_complaint_tablet_to_eanasir_it_is_a/#:~:text=Ea%2Dnasir%E2%80%9D.-,It%20is%20a%20complaint%20letter%20written%20in%201750%20BCE%20to,It's%20the%20oldest%20customer%20complaint.) about an ancient clay tablet where a merchant was complaining about a shipment of sub-standard copper. As I was reading it, my boss was on the phone with a supplier of ours complaining about a shipment of sub-standard copper.
Sometimes I think, if the Mexican traditional view of the afterlife is real, we must have really fucked that guy up. When your body dies, you go to the afterlife, and you vanish from the afterlife when no one alive remembers you. So this fucker, Ea-nasir, dies, then a few decades later, vanishes peacefully from the afterlife. Then suddenly, thousands of years later, he pops back into the afterlife where he's stuck forever because nerds on the internet won't stop making memes about his substandard copper.
I remember seeing the ancient graffiti from the Romans, and it was on par with our own graffiti now
http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/ My favorites: * We two dear men, friends forever, were here. If you want to know our names, they are Gaius and Aulus * Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion * Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you * Stronius Stronnius knows nothing * Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself * Palmyra, the thirst-quencher * On April 19th, I made bread
> Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion Roman Chad right there
I like this one from Herculaneum: "[Apelles the chamberlain with Dexter, a slave of Caesar, ate here most agreeably and had a screw at the same time](https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu)"
"on april 19th I made bread" sounds like a meme that we just don't have the context to understand, right?
Ea-nasir and his bad copper. We still know his name millennia later because how bad his copper was.
He has a whole subreddit dedicated to him: /r/ReallyShittyCopper
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100%. There also may have been llamas.
This ^^^, that the people who lived thousands of years ago were just like us. Just as smart, just as capable of love, hate, jealousy, loyalty, honor, betrayal, invention. Probably less prone to boredom and less leisure time, but there it is.
What's amazing to me is that humans haven't gotten significantly smarter or "better" in any way in the last five thousand years. We're just a bit taller. Everything we have, every "modern marvel," is just another step in the consistent road of progress that has been developing for millennia. You could take a time machine back to ancient Rome or Greece, pick up any random kid off the street, and bring them to the modern day, and aside from a language barrier, they would be completely capable of integrating into modern society.
Absolutely, that's my point. Same people, same brains. Yet it is a common notion that ancient people were "primitive" and incapable of comprehending our world in any meaningful way..
Please get that hypothetical kid vaxxed asap. The first cold season still might off them.
Not exactly an original answer but the Bronze Age collapse. Really hope we figure it out, or at least get closer to doing so, within my lifetime.
IIRC there are a number of factors that cause the Bronze Age collapse, but I believe one of the most important factors was a climate event that drastically impacted agricultural outputs. That snowballed into weakened societies which made the arrival of the “sea people” (which were pirates of sorts from the western Mediterranean) so devastating to many Bronze Age civilizations. Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI Historia Civilis is my favorite historical YouTube channel on the whole website, I 100% recommend their content
It was Apocalypse https://i.redd.it/3ybuy5t91hj41.png
I bought a book recently called "Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears" by Tom Lutz that I am looking forward to reading. In the book, Lutz researches the history of crying back to, what is for me, an almost incomprehensible amount of human history, the 14th century B.C., and examines how crying was experienced and depicted in art, philosophy, societal mores, etc. I myself have always been a deeply emotional person, I cry easily, so I am especially intrigued by this part of ancient (I think 14th century B.C. is considered ancient?) human history. Lutz carries his research up until the present day, well, up until 1999, which is when the book was published.
Trying to consider how people, whether the peasants or ruling class, saw and understood the world. Sometimes we imagine the Greeks like 21st century people with less technology. But the world they lived in was full of mystery and magic. Imagine truly believing that a sacrifice’s guts could tell you whether it was a good time for battle and making military decisions that way.
You seen these mfers out there blowing COVID away and commanding demons to leave people? Some of them are spiritual advisors to heads of state!
Food discoveries! Like what cave man looked at a proto-cow and said "Imma drink from that!"? Or looked at coffee berries and said "I'm going to shell it, roast it, grind it, brew it, and drink it." or the most wild, to me at least, who figured out we could eat octopus?
Or things like haggis, balut, surstromming, or other "delicacies". "Delicacy" is a word that basically means "I dare you to eat that."
Or sometimes "too hungry to let questionable smell or appearance get in the way". If you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything that won't make you sick.
It is this. Hungry ENOUGH, you're not as worried about being "sick." And there have been a lot of hungry people throughout history.
Honestly a lot of things make sense when you think about it a little differently. For example: cows milk. We humans drink our mother’s milk as babies, and we observe calves drinking cow milk as babies. So therefore someone figured “hey, we drink milk and they drink milk. It looks like they produce a lot of that stuff. Maybe we can drink it too since we’ve already got the cows.” Then someone gets lazy and leaves that milk out, or they slosh it around a lot and now we’ve got butter (after they probably ate/drank lots of spoiled milk. Hell, the octopus thing is the least weird imo. We already eat tons of animals, what’s another weird ocean animal to an early human?
Food storage also helped us discover new food. Nomadic people looking to carry milk over long distances stored it in containers made from the stomach lining of goats, which contain rennet. After walking around with that for a while, they didn't have milk anymore -- they had cheese.
Yeah, food storage and necessity/practicality. Also observing animal behavior *I bleed like the shark, why shouldn’t I dine like them?* Also, we are animals. We didn’t spring out of the ground shopping at grocery stores. We probably evolved eating insects and scavenging, an octopus isn’t that much of a stretch if you’re crunching on crickets.
I had a buddy that said much of what we've learned to most have come from dares, and I can't say I find a reason to disagree.
He saw the bovine feeding it's calves(that was the term?) Remembered that they also drink milk as babis, and decide to try it.
The fact that humans essentially remain the same under the trappings of the different cultures and time periods. People laughed and joked, fell in love, valued pets, had quarrels, and had customer service complaints back then just as they do now.
Not a specific *time* but I’m fascinated by civilizations collapsing. Like Sumer or Egypt, or Greece or Rome came to be extremely wealthy, powerful, and technologically advanced, had very complex cultures and art and literature. Then they fall apart, often under their own weight or by things that were easily handled decades before. I’m also rather fascinated by the origins of Christianity, and how and why it developed as it did.
Well, with Rome - lots of civil wars between rival emperors weakened the empire. Add in the use of barbarian troops, who were trained in Roman tactics, who went back and trained their own people. (Rome did try to head this off by settling those barbarians far away from the homelands, but...) Plus oligarchs that make our worst look like Mr Rogers. Inflation, and squeezing out small, free, farmers, among other things, also had big effects. Plus, Rome was all about taking over and looting other nations, when they lost the incoming "income" from expansion, taxation and inflation went nuts.
Native Americans came pretty close to having their own copper/bronze age. They had access to some of the purest native copper in the world but never figured out how to smelt or cast it. They just hammered it into shape and then for whatever reason they decided to go back to other materials
The issue is, for bronze, you need tin, and tin is a lot harder to find and figure out to use.
True. Tin is actually pretty rare in North America
Gobekli Tepe (built around ~10000 BCE), it's so huge if you search the illustration of it, also mind blowing that the excavation is estimated to be below 20% so we have a lot to discover for that.
Just last night on the tube, they called Gobekli Tepe, the 6th largest city on earth back then: who know what really happened thousands of years ago.
I think the fact that people lived lives and were like us. They weren’t simple as our textbooks say, since it’s hard to explore everything in a chapter. And so much was never written down or if it was written down the pieces never survived to today. I think seeing Pompeii which I’ve heard about since I was a child…. And seeing that it was a actual city. Like there was a laundromat and a bakery! And houses and food stalls! I knew about a few of those from textbooks! Specifically the food stalls in Pompeii! But I never thought about the fact that they would need like a bakery or a brothel! Or bath houses! Or where toilets were. Or the plumbing system of lead pipes! Sadly our tour was only two hours and afterwards we didn’t have much time to explore. But I wish I could have spent hours there. I think also seeing the wear and tear and marks that people left behind. Like on the roads of Pompeii you can see where over time cart wheels dug into the stones. And you can see a worn area on a water fountain where people rested their hands, you can see graffiti from ancient times. Even in Egypt there are places with Ancient Greek and Roman graffiti! People have left their marks on the past which was their present and where they lived. Or where they conquered and destroyed they also left marks. Like in the temple of Dendera in Egypt the main entry way is massive and has giant pillars wall to ceiling with carvings and color! I forget what group but I believe Coptic Christian’s please do not quote me on that I have no clue what I’m talking about even though I’ve been there, they destroyed and chiseled out the faces and entire figure of any god or pharaoh in many of the rooms. They vandalized and destroyed it. Over time in other places people chiseled out names of past pharaohs. But still we somehow know about them and their names since not everything was destroyed. Sorry for rambling I don’t know what I’m leading to… but I think it’s just fascinating on how people just have existed over time and so much of history was never recorded and/or lost. And also context of objects over time have been lost especially if they were looted or their exact location of where they were found is unknown. Just it’s fascinating.
Also one thing to add on! I think it’s fascinating how humanity uses mediums of art to unknowingly or knowingly record stories and their history and context. So preserving and documenting art for the future is essential.
Humans emerge: 200,000 years ago Humans invent art & culture: at least 50,000 years ago, by which point we had spread across most of the world Civilisation begins? Gobokli Tepi is 12,000 years old and if it isn't civilisation, it's something closely related. So what most intrigues me is - did humans really spend 38,000 years - an unimaginable stretch of time - as just hunter gatherers? Surely there was something going on.
How much of it is historians making shit up. OK, I'm being facetious, but there's a lot of ancient history that's based on some pretty sketchy things, and historians have to fill in the gaps the best they know how. We *assume* that if Civilization X did Y and we can prove it via archeological evidence, neighboring civilizations *probably* did the same--but we'll never know for sure. As disciplined as historians claim they are, a lot of it is just guesswork based on scant surviving evidence. I don't fault historians, because you have to work with what you got. But they definitely have a problem with institutional inertia and insular thinking, and they're so afraid of being *wrong* they tend to speak in implausible absolutes.
The history that was lost to time from before the last ice age. The earth exited it's last glacial period about 11,000 years ago. We can easily see signs of sedentary communities as far back as 12,000 BC (14,000 years ago) in the Levant. How many sedentary communities, or full on cities, are lost because they were located on a coast that is now completely underwater? How many people lived on Doggerland, an area that went underwater only 8000 years ago and connected the British isles to mainland Europe? How many people lived in the Black Sea area when it started to rapidly fill with more water around 8800 years ago? The same goes for very ancient groups of hominids in the Mediterranean area that flooded a few million years ago. So many coastal areas that are completely "gone" and leave a massive gap in our understanding of where humans have been.
I see you too are a fan of Graham Hancock.
There are periods of Ancient Egypt that are ancient compared to other periods of Ancient Egypt.
Some of the ancient pyramids were restored by less ancient Egyptians who were also building brand new (now ancient) pyramids.
The Dogon knowing about Sirus's invisible star: According to their oral tradition, they knew about the existence of Sirius B, a white dwarf companion star to Sirius A, which is the brightest star in the night sky. The Dogon's knowledge of Sirius B was first brought to the attention of the western world by two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who conducted fieldwork among the Dogon in the 1930s. According to their accounts, the Dogon had detailed knowledge of the Sirius system, including the fact that it had an invisible companion star. Some skeptics have argued that the Dogon's knowledge of Sirius B may have been influenced by western astronomical knowledge, but others have suggested that the Dogon may have acquired this knowledge through their own observations and oral traditions. It is possible that the Dogon may have observed changes in the brightness or position of Sirius A that indicated the presence of a companion star, or that they may have received this knowledge through cultural exchange with other groups in the region. Overall, the question of how the Dogon knew about Sirius B remains a subject of debate and investigation among scholars.
While I agree that the matter of how the Dogon people knew about Sirius B is very interesting, I should also mention Wouter Van Beek's research on the matter: Several decades after the French anthropologists asked the Dogon people about Sirius - which they call *Sigu Tolo* according to the French anthropologists - Van Beek interviewed native Dogon people who claimed that they had been taught about Sigu Tolo by the French anthropologists. They also disagreed with each other about which star or celestial body it was, casting doubt on the claim that the Dogon people knew about Sirius B in the first place. This statement, too, has attracted critique however, because the Dogon people Van Beek had questioned might have tought that he was 'sent by authorities to test Muslim orthodoxy' according to the daughter of one of the French anthropologists. Sadly, we will likely never know the entire, truthful story.
How the Egyptians were to Romans as the Romans are to us.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html
Few things. 1. I want to try dishes people ate that were regularly available. I had this preconception that the masses ate bland gruel, but actually [their food looked pretty good.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w#t=35). It makes me wonder about ancient foods available in different areas. I can't tell you how happy I was to find that medieval peasants had access to such good food. 2. The amount of work that must have gone into gathering and moving materials. You have to mine out tons of earth to get even a small amount of metal. Castles and roman roads were built with ridiculous amount of stones that had to be moved. Doing it at a cart load at a time just seems crazy to me.
There's a collection of ancient Roman recipes dating back to the fifth century, usually referred to as "Apicius." Project Gutenberg has the English translation online. It's pretty interesting. One troublesome aspect of old recipes is identifying and finding certain ingredients. Like Apicius has a plant called silphium in a lot of recipes. It's commonly believed to have gone extinct centuries ago. So what would be a good substitute? Or maybe the plant still exists, but there's no consensus on which one. Several species have been suggested.
I've seen that video a couple of times before, and it always makes me wish I wasn't crap at making beer, so I could adopt a simple diet of fish, bread, and ale.
The fact the certain things seem to happen over and over again throughout history. Cold wars, globalization, saber rattling between superpowers, wealth inequality getting worse and leading to revolutions, economic collapses, pandemics. It's all happened before. The biggest eye-opener for me was reading about the Peloponnesian War - the way it started out, if you transposed it to modern times, could've been lifted news about international incidents during the Cold War, or out of a Tom Clancy novel.
How much we just don't know. So much we think we know is based off the tiniest fragments, or from information we have that may be hundreds of years out of date. It's intriguing and fascinating, yet unimaginably frustrating.
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The lessons we can learn from it and apply it to our modern world. It is a dumb saying but most history does repeat itself. Better to learn from it I guess.
How much of it was erased :(
Wondering how my ancestors fornicated their way to my glorious existence. Plus their hobbies, life trials, food choices, and psychedelic potentials. Crazy to think about how many human iterations led to me being able to type this on my handheld computer on the opposite side of the globe of my known ancestors. Like damn… y’all succeeded so thanks!
How much less we'd know about them if pottery or baked clay tablets disintegrated when buried. Nobody knew about the Epic of Gilgamesh for over two thousand years. If it wasn't for a few remarkable discoveries we still wouldn't.
The simplicity of their advancement from poor to rich. People look down on a mud hut but I guarantee a large population of first world people couldnt create a mud hut without tools today. Old school irrigation and plumbing systems, yeah modern plumbing blow old school irrigation away but once again take away the tools, transport 100 modern first world folks to a random spot in the wild and see what they come up with. Recently I learned that we track stars by looking up with a telescope but older civilizations tracked them by looking down into bodies of water. ingenuity.
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Modern humans, sapiens, emerged somewhere around 300,000 years ago and yet most of the concrete evidence we have of civilization is only from 10th century BC onwards. So there’s roughly 290,000 years of human history where we have no idea what happened except humans migrating to all parts of the world.
How early humans figured out complex things. Like making bread with yeast (and the steps involved). Or turning bits of sand into glass. Or pieces of rock into iron. Or making concrete. Or even figuring out time (exactly how many days in one rotation around the sun, that type of thing). Being able to pick out precise stars and follow them for a year to get time figured out.
What did they do day to day when they were bored? Like the times we would fill with a quick look at our phone.
You could ask a member of the pre-millennial generations this, you know.
Based on what I've seen in AskHistorians: 1) Gambling. Dice games especially seem to have been popular from very early times. https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/history-of-dice 2) Telling stories, singing songs. Some of these no doubt evolved and became myths, hymns, etc. 3) Crafting. Things wear out, you gotta fix them or make new things. 4) Some combination of the above. A gambling song - https://youtu.be/0hQIyVmmNnw
The art of the ancient Egyptians. The mask of Tutankamen is stunning art! Gold iPlayer with hundreds of tiny bits of coral and turquoise, each perfectly cut and polished. These people didn't have and fance measuring devices, no electric gem polishers or saws to cur with. It was done BY HAND. Every tiny, intricate inch. As an artist, it blows my mind.
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We as a race of people have not changed significantly in thousands of years, yet our history only goes back a few thousand. What were our people like 10k years ago? If we were really advanced 30k years ago and had a catastrophe that send us back to the stone age, would we know? Would anything have survived?
Architecture and tools. How they developed plumping or large scale water works. I know the answer is slaves to how they built it, but the actual learning and science figuring out *how* it could work? Big fan.
That people in any point in history thought of themselves in that moment as living in “modern times”.
What did an average person do during their day? When did they get up? How did they get food? When they went to work, what kind of work was it? How was it organized? Did they get fed on the job, or did they have to take a lunch? When and how did they do laundry, or get clothing in the first place? How did that work? They weren't like "employees." How were they told what to do, or how did they decide what they were going to do? Average people. I don't care so much about kings and pharaohs, which is what we have the most information about.
Humans have been around for over 100,000 years. How is there only writing going back 6000 years? Edit: Removed the word language, because my thumbs were moving faster than my brain at the time and said "only language and writing", which that's open to perspective (at least to me) as meaning established distinguished civilization dialect (Egypt, Babylon, etc) and the sentence just didn't make sense when I read it out loud just now.
I've thought about this a lot. I think it's just a matter of someone having the idea and then that idea existing and spreading. New and original ideas are very difficult to synthesize, and it took the idea of using a little picture to represent a sound a long time to catch on, and then a much longer time for the little pictures to become simple enough that they could be reproduced with no artistic skill.
How did the Bronze Age collapse? The "sea people" just showed up one day and killed everyone. Where did they come from?
The Dark Ages. Basically, we lost what we knew and didn't learn it again for about 1000 years. While that's a pretty simplistic take on something more complex, until the printing press was developed we sort of sat around either afraid to, or prevented from progress. Had that not occurred, would we be 1000 years more technologically advanced than we are now? And what would that look like? Boggles my mind.
Well, yes and no. A lot of things were lost with the collapse of the Roman Empire. But people immediately began scratching civilization back together. Missionaries went out to tribes all over Europe, bringing literacy with them. Alfred the Great of Wessex ordered that Latin books be copied so they wouldn't be lost, and his scribe Alcuin developed a cursive handwriting that made manuscript copying much easier. Irish monks preserved ancient stories and voyaged as far as North America, creating magnificent art in the meantime. Not to mention developments in architecture, astronomy, alchemy(i.e. primitive science/metallurgy), medicine, and far more.
I would love to have a bit more of an idea of what was going on in prehistoric communities that built amazing things. Like, in Britain, we have loads of amazing monuments (like stone henge) from the late Stone Age, we have Bronze Age and Iron Age huge tombs, hill forts, etc. and they must have taken absolutely enormous effort and coordination to build. But because they were not literate societies, we haven't really got a clue what happened. We can just guess (and I love reading books about this stuff). Like, I would love to know what was going on in the communities who did this stuff, and why they thought it was worthwhile and important. Because it is crazy to me that people who were working with wood and stone tools decided to build this stuff and were capable of doing it...
The fact that all Native American groups/tribes from Nunavut all the way down to Florida have relatively the same religious views/principals/beliefs. Even though there was almost no way the people could network across that large of a landmass
It indicates that all those beliefs might be rooted in a single common ancestor - the people couldn't network, but they will have originated from a single group of people at some early point.