Aren’t all “teams” “of Theseus”? If the team remains in one city for say, 60 years, the people have changed over and over again. The stadium is probably different.
Now, felt can be reshaped easily with steam-level heat - but that would require a conscious effort.
The author thinks Roman had low intellect or something?
I love the perspective they had on things due to living in such different (yet remarkably similar) conditions.
I think we forget we're the "same" (more or less) homo sapiens as 200+ thousand years ago. Better overall conditions allow us to use the brain more (books, universities, etc) but our brain hasn't changed, as far as I know.
It's kind of exciting when you realize just how much there is to learn from the people who came before us. All of the most interesting, difficult problems of human minds and experiences are still almost just as pressing and difficult today, but many people had remarkable insights and made genuinely incredible progress in understanding things we tend to take for granted these days. Hard problems that we face literally every day, even.
I'm typing this on a smartphone. I don't conciously think of it as my "magic pane of glass" like the cliched Roman might but what's actually going on when I tap this screen is as much a mystery to me as it would be to them, at least beyond a few high-level concepts which it also wouldn't take all that much time to explain.
Every day we ride atop an unfathomable stack of abstractions and shouldn't take as much subconcious credit for this as we do. As a civilisation yes you might say we're smarter, but as individuals definitely not.
They would probably even spend a lot of time talking about how things were better back in their days, and how pathetic society is now.
They did not have the precursors to it, such as a lathe. Steam engine technology evolved out of cannon technology, which was developing for centuries before the steam engine. (The lathe also came about from cannon improvements.)
Early engines were used to pump water out of coal mines because they were very inefficient and transportation was very expensive.
Of course Romans actually had coal mines in Britain and the Rhineland so it wouldn’t have been entirely fat fetched.
I keep thinking of a primitive printing press, but the Romans didn't have paper, either. Paper didn't appear in Europe before 1000 AD.
Papyrus was also inferior to paper in that it tended to come apart when wet, or would just come apart.
Unless kept in very good condition scrolls might last only a few decades. As far as we can tell many ancient texts were lost well before the Roman Empire declined because they weren’t popular enough for anyone to bother copying them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
They had a Lathe too.
What an awesome invention!!!
But they did not have a metal lathe, which is substantially more sophisticated. Invention of the metal lathe is credited to Henry Maudslay around 1800.
While steam engines with pistons existed before, the poor sealing because of inaccurate bores and pistons, made them not very efficient.
You invent such things when you have resolved many other problems first. Like water and sanitation, and geopolitical stability. And no, steam engines took a lot more time anyway because advanced metallurgy was necessary to get there.
Such a snobby comment!
> The other two are housed at the Whitworth art gallery in Manchester and a museum in Florence, Italy.
This sentence is somewhere in between funny and unprofessional. The other hat in England gets an accurate location and a back link, the one in Italy gets a "in some museum in Florence". At least they put the city's name...
lostlogin•5mo ago
metalman•5mo ago
edit, on reflection there are older summerian letters sent back and forth by traders in....cloth, who had a "shop" in one city/country but the main production was in mesoptsmia proper, and if memory serves the distant trader was a woman asking for more products to sell, and again other chit chat, but both instances required exceptional conditions and the use of very durable materials, papyrus paper and dried and protected clay
cwmoore•5mo ago
kibwen•5mo ago
ChrisMarshallNY•5mo ago
I'll just get my coat...
goscript•5mo ago
The northern part of the country receives some rainfall in the winter. heavy winter rains occasionally cause flooding in Cairo, Ptolemaic Egypt was centered around Alexandria, which gets the most rain in the country - about 200 mm (7.87 in) annually. while that's still relatively low, it's not nearly as extreme as you make it seem.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Egypt#Rainfall
metalman•5mo ago
city of 400000, where it does not rain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asyut#Climate
ancient heart of eygypt, modern city of 250000 where the rain is a sort of academic thing that can be proven scientificly, but will never get the ground wet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor#Climate
thaumasiotes•5mo ago
Note that papyrus is not a "very durable material"; it's an extremely fragile one.
Papyrus records survive in Egypt, and only in Egypt, because nothing ever spoils in Egypt no matter how fragile it might be.
Cuneiform records survive all over the cuneiform-using world because they are very durable if you set fire to them.
skybrian•5mo ago
> That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation.
https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...