Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts
well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers?
this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course.
the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks.
It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that.
Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty.
The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history.
In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.
I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.
So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time.
The Korean people have had heated floors, called ondol, since the 15th century. African physicians in what is now Egypt had perfected cataract removal surgery hundreds of years before the rise of ANY western civilization with surgical knowledge. The Aztecs had sophisticated enough technology to perform cranial surgery to do everything from reducing swelling of the brain to removing foreign objects.
We still aren’t 100% sure how the Romans made their (damn-near-everlasting) cement, or the exact composition of original Damascus steel, iirc. And often Roman houses belonging to the wealthy would have heated floors, as well. Plus, there was that…whole little thing with the Roman Aqueducts, when they just…decided to move several hundred thousand tons of water, several hundred miles, over valleys and mountains. You know. Like you do.
The Romans had heated public baths! Everyone loved soap and perfume! The soap was apparently fantastic! You could go anywhere there was a market and buy body oil and even food from vending machines–in ancient Greece!
Your average European house in the 1900s, supposedly at the “peak” of their ‘exploratory’ (imperialism) boom, were cold and drafty, with no plumbing, and no heating. Sanitation amounted to literally shitting in a fancy pot and then throwing it out into the yard, or the street.
There were no sewers, so when this happened, the shit would just…chill there, until it rained, and then things got ugly.
The Minoans, hundreds and hundreds of years before, had complex city-wide plumbing systems, and flushing toilets.
The River Thames was so polluted with literal, actual human fecal matter that in the 1800s, the English government had to pass a law banning people from dumping shit directly into the river.
Eurocentrism is such a weird idea, especially when you lay out a timeline of what other people were doing in the rest of the world, before and during the rise of the various European countries.
(via brooklynbagelsenthusiast)
