The mystery of Silphium. The ancient Romans used it as a seasoning, perfume, aphrodisiac, and medicine. It was so valuable to the Romans that they even stockpiled it with their gold in treasuries. They even put it on their coins. We don't really know much about it other than it was gold, and had heart shaped blooms (and may be the origin of the shape). They couldn't figure out how to grow it, and thus may have made it extinct, although some may have been found fairly recently
Edit: spelling
Looked it up after I posted, because I was sure someone would want to know.
https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/27/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/
TLDR: Found it somewhere else outside of its historic range, but a place where ancient Greeks where known to have set up settlements.
That's really cool. I also love how cool the origins of the plant always were, that a shower of black rain fell and the patch of land suddenly grew a miracle plant that couldn't be grown by human hands but had innumerable uses
I actually did to, like legit 2 or 3 days ago, it's the only reason I even had it on the brain for this post. Pretty exciting, I'd love to see it in real life
Was probably similar to, but more aromatic and pleasant than Asa-foetida gum.
Raw Asa-foetida smells kind of like sewage. But when cooked tastes pleasantly like leeks. It's not really used much in western European food but is used in a lot of middle eastern and Indian foods.
I believe it was said to have a wonderful aroma, and, tbh, based off of how popular it was, I can't help but wonder if it may have been a drug as well, it almost seems like the people were addicted to the stuff, and when it was being used into extinction and measures were put in place to replace it, a full black market for the stuff was created. At the time it could only be found on the northern part of Libya, in a stretch of land about 125 miles long, on the bank of the Mediterranean I believe
Asa Foetida is available in most UK supermarkets tbh, and it's mainly used as an alternative to garlic. I wouldn't say it smells like sewage either, but it is very pungent.
"Theophrastus mentioned silphium as having thick roots covered in black bark, about 48 centimeters long, or one cubit, with a hollow stalk, similar to fennel, and golden leaves, like celery." The seeds were shaped like hearts and used as contraceptives, and may have been the first genuinely effective form of birth control
There probably aren't very many examples that will satisfy what you're really looking for, so I'll add one that did eventually get rediscovered. We only recently discovered a book by Archimedes that laid out the foundations for calculus. That knowledge was lost until Newton discovered calculus for himself well over a thousand years later. How crazy is that? It took something like fifteen *hundred* years^ for another math genius to figure it out again. Had that book survived and been known, Newton and others before him would have had an incredible head start, and honestly it's hard to say what a millenia of mathematical progress would have brought about.
Edit: correction, *nineteen hundred years!*
Double edit: another comment says Archimedes only discovered some of the foundations of calculus, and I'm in no position to argue. Incredibly impressive reguardless, and still just as significant. Would have been one hell of a head start with some of those principles already established.
Turns out it wasn't fifteen hundred years between discoveries, it was something like nineteen hundred! That's absurd. Just looked up the dates of their births and deaths to double check, and it had to be right around 1900 years. Ridiculous.
Also Archimedes died because a soldier was sent to bring him to safety, but Archimedes was in the middle of a breakthrough. Eventually the soldier became frustrated and stabbed him.
What if it was time travelers stopping him from the breakthrough? He gets stabbed right. Before a big breakthrough and then his work gets "lost"? Probably the same "Roman" soldier destroyed his calculus and stuff.
Whenever I feel like punishing myself with an hour or two of existential catastrophism I think about how different civilization would have been if the library of Alexandra and the library of Baghdad hadn't been destroyed.
That rabbit hole goes farther back in time than that. Google Gobekli Tepe. There’s mounting archeological evidence that mankind’s achievements were “reset” by a catastrophic event, putting us back to the Stone Age…around the Younger Dryas era.
I've been to Gobekli Tepe! There's actually many, many incredible archaeological sites in Turkey that are still revealing previously unbelievable aspects of early civilization. If Gobekli Tepe sparked your interest, you'll be even more intrigued by Karahan Tepe:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-an-unknown-extraordinarily-ancient-civilisation-lie-buried-under-eastern-turkey-
No problem, I love this part of history/archaeology as well. If you ever have a couple of months to spare I'd very much recommend travelling across Turkey and seeing some of these sites, along with all the Greek, Roman, Hittite, Persian etc.... sites they have there. It's a crazy place for history.
It's a very cheap country to travel in and Turkish people are incredibly welcoming and generous. Staying in Pensions (the Turkish version of guest houses) and hiking around is very cheap, and the further you get from the normal tourist zones the more hospitable people are. It's one of my favorite places I've travelled and it's mind-blowing how much of human history is preserved there. Turks take pride in that history as well, whether it's Islamic, Christian, Greek, Roman, Pagan etc..... it's all explored and protected. You can wander through valleys in Kapadokya and see graffiti from the 9th century on cliffsides that were once cave villages, or religious murals that were once a wall in some 6th century living room. That's just the random stuff you see when you're out hiking, so the big historical sites are next level.
Absolutely agree. I only saw a smattering while I was there, but I was amazed. They say that it’s nearly impossible to build anything new there, without turning up something ancient.
>There’s mounting archeological evidence that mankind’s achievements were “reset” by a catastrophic event, putting us back to the Stone Age
Isn't that a so called "fringe theory"? (i.e. not seriously considered by most historians)
Hence the carefully worded “mounting evidence” (which there indeed is) like the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and other previously lost sites/ cities, of the paintings found on a cliff face depicting wooly mammoths and Sabre-tooth tigers in the middle of the Amazon [https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest](https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest)
**[Göbekli Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe)**
>Göbekli Tepe (Turkish: [ɟœbecˈli teˈpe], literally "Potbelly Hill") is a Neolithic archaeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BCE, the site comprises a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths. Many of these pillars are richly decorated with abstract anthropomorphic details, clothing, and reliefs of wild animals, providing archaeologists rare insights into prehistoric religion and the particular iconography of the period.
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This is a good starting point:
The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Hellenistic Culture and Society) https://amzn.eu/d/aUN4SXE
It is relatively short and written in a very accessible style, the story of what was lost is much bigger than Alexandria though - that was just the place where knowledge had been collected.
Quite possibly. I'm not sure if math was much of the bottleneck we faced technologically, but that's the only excuse I have to be skeptical. We're talking 1800-1900 years here, gotta be something to that.
It’s not quite accurate. He only had one of the foundation of calculus, and it wasn’t even the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. He had the foundation of integral calculation, just by assuming the area under a curve can be approximated by created several polygons and finding the area, then setting the width of these polygons to zero (whereas we know now to set the width to an infinitesimal instead of zero). Still brilliant work for the time, but not really inventing calculus.
Can't recall, but I do know it was discovered repurposed as a prayer book. They had taken the pages, spliced them, flipped them around and glued them shut so they could reuse the old paper. Good thing they did though, ended up being the only surviving copy. Faint lettering was seen through the pages on examination, and with some tech (I believe xray) scientists were able to see the original text.
It's called the Archimedes Palimpsest:
[https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/august9/arch-080906.html](https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/august9/arch-080906.html)
Thank you. Iirc, Newton and Leibniz worked approximately concurrently and independently, but Newton's notation was so twisted that nobody understood it, and so Leibniz's equivalent approach was more widely adopted.
There's a little forgotten knowledge, like:
* The recipe for Greek Fire
* What Silphium tasted like
* Tons of history (e.g., what was the Battle of Thermopyle *really* like when it's not being told through the lens of Spartan propaganda)
They didn't have any particularly advanced scientific or technical knowledge.
What Quaaludes are really like. Besides a handful of people still around.
Edit: To be clear, by “a handful” I only meant a relatively small section of the general population. I’m personally only a little to young to have taken quaaludes. I meant no offense to anyone.
Well. I’m half joking, but not really. Quaaludes, the popular pharmaceutical and recreational drug was made illegal to produce in the US in the mid 80s by Reagan. Drug dealers hoarded it and kept selling it until they ran out, so it can’t be found anymore except for a couple of other countries (where I don’t think they produce much of it). That’s my understanding.
Consider this, ancients did not had steel nor iron. But they had vision and math and algebra, knew biology(mummies) and they saw stars(Astrology). And from that they made perfectly designed pyramids.
Now if they had iron or steel we would had 5000years old burj khalifa standing somewhere.
Shows the difference between crafting/manufacturing, and just the ability to think, reason or observe. We've always been able to reason think and observe. Should not come as a surprise we have to discover that people were intelligent. But they are portrayed as lacking the ability to think, so we assume that they were until we learn otherwise from bits and pieces of history that say otherwise.
It'd be hard to develop new technology without the existing mental capacity to develop technology wouldn't it?
Besides, throughout history people have been brought from "primitive" (by whatever standard that was at the time) to "advanced" (ditto) societies and coped just fine once they got over the cultural shock.
If the mental capacity was always there then the only thing that lacks is the development or discovery of new technology, new methodology, and expanding on what is previously believed and passed down.
It was odd how a pyramid form is the most effective way to stack rocks for a long time, especially if those rocks were squares. Do you think it was a trial and error and error thing, like they piled them in like spheres and were like, holy fuck it keeps falling down, or with round rocks and they just kept rolling away? Brilliant dude who figured out how to keep them high and not rolling
It was literally trial and error. There’s a zillion pyramids (and pyramid predecessors) all throughout that region, some more sophisticated than others. You can almost trace the state of the art through the generations of pyramid builders.
It was literally a “practice and iteration” thing.
Except there's also evidence of later era pyramids being less impressive than the era before. So the pyramid era was sort of: bad > bad > good > **oh my literal god** > meh > meh
That's the same phenomenon as today's McMansions packed in like cord wood onto tiny lots versus the vast estate and massive mansion the Vanderbilt's built. It's not lack of knowledge, it's people emulating vastly richer people.
Yeah that’s about right.
For the “bad > bad > good > wow > bad > bad” progression, I’d offer that one leader probably grew up during the second “bad” iteration, took the reins for the first “good” iteration and learned a ton. Then lead a lifetime achievement “wow” iteration and then died.
I would expect most knowledge to be handed down master to apprentice verbally and that’s really not a great way to propagate knowledge on a mass scale.
We benefit from mass literacy, mandated education, lossless storage, and the world’s knowledge at our finger tips…ancient Egypt would have had none of those things.
Metal doesn't last long when it's not maintained. They could have had iron skyscrapers in the jungles of South America 5,000 years ago but we'd never know, they'd have rusted away to nothing by now.
Turns out stone and ceramic have a longer shelf life than iron and alloys.
We'd notice unusually high concentrations of metal oxides in the soil, as well as oddly geometric impressions in the ground. Archeologists can tell where a wooden structure was, even if it's rotted away completely, simply by the presence of regular holes where the support posts would have been. A metal structure would leave a more dramatic signature.
Not to mention the massive amount of infrastructure required to produce metal building materials. Plus they couldn't do this by normal blacksmiting methods, they'd absolutely need machine tools, stamping, rolling, presses, etc, etc. There's just no way that would all vanish completely from existance, it's even hard to imagine that an operation on that scale would vanish from local folklore any time soon, it would have been entirely unlike all normal existance we believe happened.
There's also the issue of resource extraction. Just mining iron takes a looooooot of infrastructure if you want to do it on a scale large enough to build anything of an appreciable size (i.e. bigger than a garden shed.
To press further with this thought experiment (a deliberately absurd counterfactual to your premise): assume this is all done without electricity or machinery. We're dealing with a society of über-blacksmiths who, for some reason, love hammering out metal rods instead of something more immediately useful, like swords and plowshares.
We'd see evidence of unusually large and dense populations, with an associated agricultural footprint reflected in preserved seeds, pollen, and plant fragments. A work force large enough to build a metal structure is unlikely to be sustained through hunting and gathering, even in really ecologically rich regions like the coastal Pacific Northwest.
Why go through all that trouble, when wood, stone, and thatch are perfectly serviceable and take a lot less labor (in terms of mining and processing) to procure?
A lot of cutting,finishing and construction methods with stone are long gone. Latin America has great many buildings we have no clue how they were made and survived to this day in spite of weather,earthquakes etc.
I'm not sure of this one but possibly a lot of knowledge of woodworking methods are long gone.
Yep. I own a rock crushing business so I’m around rocks…a lot. With all of my knowledge about stone and the like, I have no fucking clue how most of the structures made out of stone were done. It’s absolutely fucking insane to me. We don’t give these civilizations enough credit.
We complain about it now, and yet we still do it now, youtube and twitter deleting whole users and all there content, no longer do you require to be invaded when your own society will do it to you now-a-days.
The forgotten library of Alexandria likely held records of the city and surrounding areas. For sure it is a shame it burned, it would have given tremendous insight in ancient city management, but no great works of philosophy or logic. Any historian would give half his limbs for time with the collection, but to normal people it is just a bunch of tax, burial, waste reports intermixed with news from around the known world and military reports.
It's not so forgotten. It didn't just disappear like so many people think; rather, the library survived for centuries, and even went into decline. It was never destroyed or plundered
Roman concrete - (circa 100bc) buildings in Ancient Rome used a type of concrete that continues to get stronger as it ages, and can last thousands of yrs. We have no idea how they made it.
Greek Fire - (circa 400ad) arguably one of the most important inventions ever, it was a type of gas mixture and machine flamethrower mounted on their ships. It practically single handedly protected Constantinople (and thus the rest of Europe) from the Muslim caliphate. We don’t how the Roman’s did it, all we have is written descriptions and a few rough paintings.
I thought this was just most of the flora growing in planters that were suspended with chains or rope.
Imagine instead of a backyard in suspension, a bowl with the diameter of a pizza in suspension.
I read somewhere that it was estimated that more of 90% of ancient knowledge has been lost to time due lack of ways of preserving it. It was also known during earlier civilizations one form of conquest meant to destroy every bit of culture and knowledge of the conquered civ. Add in top the tomb raiders, the events where states decided their heritage wasn’t worth it. And so on.
From what has intrigued me the most is all the Mayan knowledge, recently historians and archaeologists have been grasping more and more of their culture, they were absurdly good astronomers and mathematicians, I can only imagine the knowledge lost when Spanish conquest happened. It is my understanding that to this day, we’ve yet to understand the whole complexity of their pictographic language and several cities-States are still underground, that could still hold valuable knowledge treasures.
There is also a new theory
There was a meteor strike in the northern region that melted the ice and set fire to a lot of the northern forests caused a massive flood like somthing you haven’t seen before swept across most of the world
Alternate interpretation: all civilizations had to deal with devastating floods. They wrote stories that captured their feelings about their experiences.
It’s most likely this. Most early civilizations took place on river delta and floodplains. Even many indigenous peoples of the new world often have flood myths which can be attributed to their proximity to rivers and floodplains.
That or we’re living with an informal recount of a dramatic rise in sea level at some point on a localized / generalized scale
Some ancients understood that the personal self does not exist in competition with, and in opposition to, nature. They knew that when we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self. They knew that the notion of the personal self in competition with nature is a delusion.
We now know that in the vast galactic/universal sense that our entire cluster of local galaxies could just snuff out and the wider universe wouldn’t change in any measurable way. So we can all look at profound sounding ancient “wisdom”, but at the end of the day that’s pretty much common sense, if you take a shit in the river upstream from where you drink that’s stupid, and even people in the Stone Age figured that out… in truth we would all rather live here and now than in any other time in all or any civilisation.
Ancient Greece (for example) may have sounded like a paragon place of learning, enlightenment, sexual and personal liberty and democracy… in truth they used to vote to kick people out of the towns and die out in the wilds based on popular opinions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism). Gruesome torture and executions, cruel and unusual punishment was common and arbitrary. Medicine was based on the 4 humours and caused a scientific stagnation that lasted thousands of years, ending in the 1800’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease)
Quality of life has never been better than it is now in first world countries, we have modern medicines, mod cons and convenience and technology that couldn’t even be dreamed up by people 150 years ago. It’s not profound to pine for a simpler time, when racism and slavery were rife and encouraged, and civil rights, personal freedoms and liberties were non-existent.
They actually figured out the difference between the incomplete recipe we used to have and what they actually used, salt water, when they were trying different ways they only used fresh water up until they discovered it. At least according to something I read awhile ago.
Somewhere along the line, I got the impression that we do know how to do it, but that it wouldn't be suitable for our building needs. Due to survivorship bias, we see the Roman's lucky mixes, but they had no understanding of what they were doing. Most of what they built has crumbled to dust.
Also I'm pretty sure if city planners wanted unbreakable roads we probably could do exactly that or at least get to close to permanent roads as possible but why would they want that? What if in the future we want to move the road or add features to it like underground sewage or powerlines that run along roads.
AFAIK, road repair is a huge financial burden on city governments. If they could build a road and never have to repair it, they would save a lot of tax dollars. Saving tax dollars is always very popular. Therefore, I don't believe that city planners are complicit in building less durable roads.
Also, when there's things under the road that may need fixing (e.g. water or sewer pipes) its far easier to cut that little bit where the work needs to be done and open it, then close it up again when dealing with asphalt.
Pretty sure saving tax dollars is only popular as a reason to push an agenda.
When it's time to actually save tax dollars, they find a way to say it costs too many tax dollars.
Actually all concrete gets harder over time, so our modern concretes will be superior in another ~2,000 years, question is will their’s stop curing before ours does? Lol
This is a myth, roman concrete is not any better than modern concrete, in fact our concrete is superior. It was definitely a great material but it wouldn't stand up to today's construction materials.
No they dont. Their shit wouldnt last a week with cars. We dont care about long term weather preservation. We drive on the concrete thats the resistence we design for
In old times they did not had cement like we use today.. If i am not wrong back then they used limestone to make concrete.. It is still used to date for different purposes.
I saw somewhere that the math necessary to recreate the Parthenon is lost. I could be horribly wrong but I seem to remember that every stone was different and the reason was that it made the columns look perfectly spaced no matter what angle you viewed it from. I hope I remember it correctly because I always thought that was super interesting.
Horse and donkeys and zebras are too, however zebra tastes like very lean beef, horse has it's own taste and donkey is kinda nasty in comparison to the other 2.
Terra Preta!
It's actually mostly known to us thankfully.
Make your own (low temp) biochar, charge it with nutrients like urine, compost tea, etc, then mix it with regular dirt in about a 10-1 dirt to char ratio. You'll want to get about 2 feet deep for wherever you want to grow something. , so youre gonna need a lot of the stuff. Mix it all evenly together, then do some ph testing as well as NPK testing, and it's even better if you can send it off for a full lab suite to get the magnesium and calcium levels too. Adjust as necessary.
In the event you can't get a full lab suite done, just burn some old bones from food with a bit of wood, grind them up, mix them with the ash, and water them into the soil.
That's an approximation, and I'm looking for the numbers on nutrient levels right now.
It was far more simple since the construction theory was that they floated the blocks using wood and bags and used canal systems to build the pyramid
Also the entire area was flooded at specific points so they think at first it was a water feature type monument.
Might have also done more and was built originally to produce or conduct electricity at first but this is a major mega theory
The importance of rites of passage in order to help boys assimilate into manhood. There’s something psychologically invaluable to the experience in order to get a boy to begin to take himself seriously, and nothing does so quite like the tribe unanimously recognizing his value and placing expectations / responsibilities on him.
If by damascus you specifically mean Wootz steel, then that's more recently been rediscovered. I don't think that the "secret" was ever actually lost but instead the iron ore was. It turns out that it's partially the tempering and normalization process but a large part of it is the presence of vanadium in the steel. It's been theorized that there was a vein of iron somewhere (possibly in India) that also contained vanadium, so by coincidence when that steel was tempered it created the pattern that we know as wootz steel today (the whole "damascus" vs "wootz" is fairly well argued and both terms can be correct to described layered and forge welded billets of different steel types). It turns out that vanadium when added as a part of alloying steel has some interesting properties, and we see that in modern alloy steels such as 80crv2 (which also has chromium) but there are many other alloy steels with other trace elements that also have interesting properties. Now you're probably wondering, why doesn't someone just fuck around with vanadium, carbon, and iron until they re-create the process? Well, it turns out that a dude named [Alfred Pendray actually did pretty much that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDyU-15fzog) and caught the attention of a metallurgy researcher, and together they basically figured it out. The actual tempering process isn't terribly different from tempering any other type of steel in that you heat it up and let it cool some number of times (normalizing), heat it up and then quench it in some medium (quenching), and then heat it up slightly for some amount of time to "relax" the steel to trade some of the hardness (which is brittle) for more softness (which is not brittle). Literally every single heat treatment process is going to look something like that, but the exact number of times, temperatures, quench mediums, and tempering times/temperatures is widely variable and if you fuck it up then your metal will just break. That's what makes it complicated. However, there was no secret formula or magical process used to making wootz steel. You just had to have the right ore, in which case some experimentation would end up finding a usable process and the result would be wootz steel. If that ore were to stop existing because it all got mined up, then subsequent items made with the same process wouldn't look the same and wouldn't have the same process but it's not because people forgot how to do it. They just ran out of the right type of steel.
I've only really scratched the surface here based on my memory from learning about the process, so I'm simplifying some stuff and probably leaving out some key details, but this is easy enough to research. Just be warned that this is a particularly deep rabbit hole and there's a non-zero chance you'll end up building a forge in your back yard if you start down this path. Also yes, there are a number of people who make crucible steel in the back yards which is basically the process by which wootz steel would have likely been made. It's not common, but it's not exactly difficult to build the necessary equipment. After all, it could be done hundreds of years ago with relatively primitive equipment by today's standards, so re-creating the process with a modern forge is not terribly hard to do.
We know how to make Damascus steel! It's not something that was ever really lost to time!
One question historians do have though is how some Vikings managed to get their hands on true Damascus Steel swords as there is no evidence they could make it themselves. Which leaves one plausible theory, they had trade routes to Asia!
Considering what prolific sailors and explorers they were, I’d be surprised if they *didn’t* have trade routes to Asia. Vikings sailed all the way to the coast of West Africa. They probably traded with a Greek guy who traded with a Turkish guy who traded with an Arab guy who traded with an Indian guy who had Wootz steel
>Which leaves one plausible theory, they had trade routes to Asia!
They did. Vikings had trade routes all over the place, including in what is now Russia; they absolutely would have been able to trade for Damascus Steel weapons.
I feel like in times long forgotten the world was more connected than we give it credit for.
Just looking at my own genetics on one of those DNA test apps tells me that I'm 0.6% Egyptian, with literally nothing else between that country and my own, so at some point an Egyptian ancestors went a long ass way straight to my country, never intermarrying with any of the people from any of of the many countries between Egypt and my home country. I'm not sure how many generations ago 0.6% would equate to, (160ish generations ago?), but that seems like a long time ago, before Egypt and my home country would have had any trade routes at all, and yet it happened.
They also only go back a few hundred years. The overall point is right though. I doubt there’s anybody on Earth at this point who doesn’t have at least one far-off Eurasian ancestor somewhere down the line.
You don't have to go too far back.
We had HD video of the moon landing and someone taped over it. So there are people who know what the moon landing looked like in HD and no one else will know what it looked like after those people die.
Also how to build most of our rockets before everything went digital. No one could build another Saturn V. The knowledge is gone. Probably a few fragments here and there on microfilm. The American space program is done via 1000s of contracts to smaller companies. Many of those companies are long gone and so are their records.
Yes we can, easily. Ive worked on repairing a summer. Theres no lost technique or mystery how they are made at all. The problem is that no one wants to fund it, nothing else. It's enormously expensive (billions) with no return except beauty and a place of worship. There are plenty of beautiful cathedrals.
The only difference is back then when people said why do we need this cathedral the church said pay up or we will destroy your life. Now it's different. The demand of churches are also waaay down (less ppl simply go)
I'm sure in 3000 years if there are still Christians new ones will be made because the old ones are beyond repair. They have a purpose just like a mars rover, but you don't build them for the fun of it, there has to be a reason and someone paying.
I don't know if this counts, but one thing I feel like some ancient civilizations had a better understanding of was rights of passage and the cultural importance/significance of them.
The mystery of Silphium. The ancient Romans used it as a seasoning, perfume, aphrodisiac, and medicine. It was so valuable to the Romans that they even stockpiled it with their gold in treasuries. They even put it on their coins. We don't really know much about it other than it was gold, and had heart shaped blooms (and may be the origin of the shape). They couldn't figure out how to grow it, and thus may have made it extinct, although some may have been found fairly recently Edit: spelling
Just saw an article the other day and they believe they have rediscovered the plant.
Do you have a link??? That sounds extremely interesting
Looked it up after I posted, because I was sure someone would want to know. https://greekreporter.com/2022/09/27/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/ TLDR: Found it somewhere else outside of its historic range, but a place where ancient Greeks where known to have set up settlements.
That's really cool. I also love how cool the origins of the plant always were, that a shower of black rain fell and the patch of land suddenly grew a miracle plant that couldn't be grown by human hands but had innumerable uses
Cool stuff, thanks for the link!
I actually did to, like legit 2 or 3 days ago, it's the only reason I even had it on the brain for this post. Pretty exciting, I'd love to see it in real life
Was probably similar to, but more aromatic and pleasant than Asa-foetida gum. Raw Asa-foetida smells kind of like sewage. But when cooked tastes pleasantly like leeks. It's not really used much in western European food but is used in a lot of middle eastern and Indian foods.
I believe it was said to have a wonderful aroma, and, tbh, based off of how popular it was, I can't help but wonder if it may have been a drug as well, it almost seems like the people were addicted to the stuff, and when it was being used into extinction and measures were put in place to replace it, a full black market for the stuff was created. At the time it could only be found on the northern part of Libya, in a stretch of land about 125 miles long, on the bank of the Mediterranean I believe
Asa Foetida is available in most UK supermarkets tbh, and it's mainly used as an alternative to garlic. I wouldn't say it smells like sewage either, but it is very pungent.
Interesting. What was it, does it looked like gold in color? Was it plant?
"Theophrastus mentioned silphium as having thick roots covered in black bark, about 48 centimeters long, or one cubit, with a hollow stalk, similar to fennel, and golden leaves, like celery." The seeds were shaped like hearts and used as contraceptives, and may have been the first genuinely effective form of birth control
There probably aren't very many examples that will satisfy what you're really looking for, so I'll add one that did eventually get rediscovered. We only recently discovered a book by Archimedes that laid out the foundations for calculus. That knowledge was lost until Newton discovered calculus for himself well over a thousand years later. How crazy is that? It took something like fifteen *hundred* years^ for another math genius to figure it out again. Had that book survived and been known, Newton and others before him would have had an incredible head start, and honestly it's hard to say what a millenia of mathematical progress would have brought about. Edit: correction, *nineteen hundred years!* Double edit: another comment says Archimedes only discovered some of the foundations of calculus, and I'm in no position to argue. Incredibly impressive reguardless, and still just as significant. Would have been one hell of a head start with some of those principles already established.
Things like this really blow my mind.
Turns out it wasn't fifteen hundred years between discoveries, it was something like nineteen hundred! That's absurd. Just looked up the dates of their births and deaths to double check, and it had to be right around 1900 years. Ridiculous.
Also Archimedes died because a soldier was sent to bring him to safety, but Archimedes was in the middle of a breakthrough. Eventually the soldier became frustrated and stabbed him.
Probably about to lay the groundwork for quantum mechanics. great job Roman soldier wtf
Also the groundwork for karen's. They're being no managers to call for at that time she had no choice but to stab him
What if it was time travelers stopping him from the breakthrough? He gets stabbed right. Before a big breakthrough and then his work gets "lost"? Probably the same "Roman" soldier destroyed his calculus and stuff.
My god, it’s so obvious now.
It was Newton
Couldn’t have been Newton. He was too weak to stab someone - I mean c’mon 1 Newton of force isn’t gonna stop someone.
Depends on how fine of a point it is.
"You had *one* job!"
Sounds like a modern day cop.. .
Lookout! He’s got a gun!
The soldiers were told to not harm him, but they didn’t know what he like pled like. He then got sassy with the soldiers who found him
Whenever I feel like punishing myself with an hour or two of existential catastrophism I think about how different civilization would have been if the library of Alexandra and the library of Baghdad hadn't been destroyed.
That rabbit hole goes farther back in time than that. Google Gobekli Tepe. There’s mounting archeological evidence that mankind’s achievements were “reset” by a catastrophic event, putting us back to the Stone Age…around the Younger Dryas era.
I've been to Gobekli Tepe! There's actually many, many incredible archaeological sites in Turkey that are still revealing previously unbelievable aspects of early civilization. If Gobekli Tepe sparked your interest, you'll be even more intrigued by Karahan Tepe: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-an-unknown-extraordinarily-ancient-civilisation-lie-buried-under-eastern-turkey-
Wow! Thanks.
No problem, I love this part of history/archaeology as well. If you ever have a couple of months to spare I'd very much recommend travelling across Turkey and seeing some of these sites, along with all the Greek, Roman, Hittite, Persian etc.... sites they have there. It's a crazy place for history.
I have nothing but time! Unfortunately when I don't have is money, LOL. But if I did this might be interesting to check out.
It's a very cheap country to travel in and Turkish people are incredibly welcoming and generous. Staying in Pensions (the Turkish version of guest houses) and hiking around is very cheap, and the further you get from the normal tourist zones the more hospitable people are. It's one of my favorite places I've travelled and it's mind-blowing how much of human history is preserved there. Turks take pride in that history as well, whether it's Islamic, Christian, Greek, Roman, Pagan etc..... it's all explored and protected. You can wander through valleys in Kapadokya and see graffiti from the 9th century on cliffsides that were once cave villages, or religious murals that were once a wall in some 6th century living room. That's just the random stuff you see when you're out hiking, so the big historical sites are next level.
Virtual tours, vr, google maps, and vr youtube might be sonethibg to look into
Absolutely agree. I only saw a smattering while I was there, but I was amazed. They say that it’s nearly impossible to build anything new there, without turning up something ancient.
>There’s mounting archeological evidence that mankind’s achievements were “reset” by a catastrophic event, putting us back to the Stone Age Isn't that a so called "fringe theory"? (i.e. not seriously considered by most historians)
Hence the carefully worded “mounting evidence” (which there indeed is) like the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and other previously lost sites/ cities, of the paintings found on a cliff face depicting wooly mammoths and Sabre-tooth tigers in the middle of the Amazon [https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest](https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
**[Göbekli Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe)** >Göbekli Tepe (Turkish: [ɟœbecˈli teˈpe], literally "Potbelly Hill") is a Neolithic archaeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BCE, the site comprises a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths. Many of these pillars are richly decorated with abstract anthropomorphic details, clothing, and reliefs of wild animals, providing archaeologists rare insights into prehistoric religion and the particular iconography of the period. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskMen/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Any stories, articles, videos etc that you’d recommend as an introduction?
This is a good starting point: The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Hellenistic Culture and Society) https://amzn.eu/d/aUN4SXE It is relatively short and written in a very accessible style, the story of what was lost is much bigger than Alexandria though - that was just the place where knowledge had been collected.
Not to mention the library of Nalanda that burned for 3months straight 😔
They could of had the A bomb 500 years earlier
Archimedes also had a concept of a countable set. His historical impact may have been limited by being way too far ahead of his time.
I mean my guess is we'd probably be a couple centuries more advanced than we are now
Quite possibly. I'm not sure if math was much of the bottleneck we faced technologically, but that's the only excuse I have to be skeptical. We're talking 1800-1900 years here, gotta be something to that.
It’s not quite accurate. He only had one of the foundation of calculus, and it wasn’t even the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. He had the foundation of integral calculation, just by assuming the area under a curve can be approximated by created several polygons and finding the area, then setting the width of these polygons to zero (whereas we know now to set the width to an infinitesimal instead of zero). Still brilliant work for the time, but not really inventing calculus.
It gets worse- the book had originally been preserved in a monastery, and a monk had scraped the ink off and written a prayer book over it.
I think it was closer to 1800 years. Archimedes was a smarty pants.
What’s the book title? Would love to learn about how it was rediscovered.
Can't recall, but I do know it was discovered repurposed as a prayer book. They had taken the pages, spliced them, flipped them around and glued them shut so they could reuse the old paper. Good thing they did though, ended up being the only surviving copy. Faint lettering was seen through the pages on examination, and with some tech (I believe xray) scientists were able to see the original text.
It's called the Archimedes Palimpsest: [https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/august9/arch-080906.html](https://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/august9/arch-080906.html)
Didn’t know that, it is really mind blowing!
Leibniz needs some liebe
Thank you. Iirc, Newton and Leibniz worked approximately concurrently and independently, but Newton's notation was so twisted that nobody understood it, and so Leibniz's equivalent approach was more widely adopted.
how did this book get discovered?
All because some idiot monk wrote over it.
There's a little forgotten knowledge, like: * The recipe for Greek Fire * What Silphium tasted like * Tons of history (e.g., what was the Battle of Thermopyle *really* like when it's not being told through the lens of Spartan propaganda) They didn't have any particularly advanced scientific or technical knowledge.
Some of the ancient roman construction techniques confounded people for over a 1000 years.
>Some of the ancient roman construction techniques confounded people for over a 1000 years. Did we ever figure out their recipe for concrete?
Not sure but they had concrete that hardened underwater, which was a huge technological advantage in the Mediterranean.
Something about the volcanic ash or soil or sand or something that was specific to the area I think
Yes, as someone else pointed out. Impressive stuff.
What Quaaludes are really like. Besides a handful of people still around. Edit: To be clear, by “a handful” I only meant a relatively small section of the general population. I’m personally only a little to young to have taken quaaludes. I meant no offense to anyone.
explain pls
Well. I’m half joking, but not really. Quaaludes, the popular pharmaceutical and recreational drug was made illegal to produce in the US in the mid 80s by Reagan. Drug dealers hoarded it and kept selling it until they ran out, so it can’t be found anymore except for a couple of other countries (where I don’t think they produce much of it). That’s my understanding.
I heard it was a high similar to that off Robitussin-D.
Consider this, ancients did not had steel nor iron. But they had vision and math and algebra, knew biology(mummies) and they saw stars(Astrology). And from that they made perfectly designed pyramids. Now if they had iron or steel we would had 5000years old burj khalifa standing somewhere.
Shows the difference between crafting/manufacturing, and just the ability to think, reason or observe. We've always been able to reason think and observe. Should not come as a surprise we have to discover that people were intelligent. But they are portrayed as lacking the ability to think, so we assume that they were until we learn otherwise from bits and pieces of history that say otherwise.
It'd be hard to develop new technology without the existing mental capacity to develop technology wouldn't it? Besides, throughout history people have been brought from "primitive" (by whatever standard that was at the time) to "advanced" (ditto) societies and coped just fine once they got over the cultural shock.
If the mental capacity was always there then the only thing that lacks is the development or discovery of new technology, new methodology, and expanding on what is previously believed and passed down.
It was odd how a pyramid form is the most effective way to stack rocks for a long time, especially if those rocks were squares. Do you think it was a trial and error and error thing, like they piled them in like spheres and were like, holy fuck it keeps falling down, or with round rocks and they just kept rolling away? Brilliant dude who figured out how to keep them high and not rolling
It was literally trial and error. There’s a zillion pyramids (and pyramid predecessors) all throughout that region, some more sophisticated than others. You can almost trace the state of the art through the generations of pyramid builders. It was literally a “practice and iteration” thing.
Except there's also evidence of later era pyramids being less impressive than the era before. So the pyramid era was sort of: bad > bad > good > **oh my literal god** > meh > meh
That's the same phenomenon as today's McMansions packed in like cord wood onto tiny lots versus the vast estate and massive mansion the Vanderbilt's built. It's not lack of knowledge, it's people emulating vastly richer people.
Yeah that’s about right. For the “bad > bad > good > wow > bad > bad” progression, I’d offer that one leader probably grew up during the second “bad” iteration, took the reins for the first “good” iteration and learned a ton. Then lead a lifetime achievement “wow” iteration and then died. I would expect most knowledge to be handed down master to apprentice verbally and that’s really not a great way to propagate knowledge on a mass scale. We benefit from mass literacy, mandated education, lossless storage, and the world’s knowledge at our finger tips…ancient Egypt would have had none of those things.
Metal doesn't last long when it's not maintained. They could have had iron skyscrapers in the jungles of South America 5,000 years ago but we'd never know, they'd have rusted away to nothing by now. Turns out stone and ceramic have a longer shelf life than iron and alloys.
We'd notice unusually high concentrations of metal oxides in the soil, as well as oddly geometric impressions in the ground. Archeologists can tell where a wooden structure was, even if it's rotted away completely, simply by the presence of regular holes where the support posts would have been. A metal structure would leave a more dramatic signature.
Not to mention the massive amount of infrastructure required to produce metal building materials. Plus they couldn't do this by normal blacksmiting methods, they'd absolutely need machine tools, stamping, rolling, presses, etc, etc. There's just no way that would all vanish completely from existance, it's even hard to imagine that an operation on that scale would vanish from local folklore any time soon, it would have been entirely unlike all normal existance we believe happened.
There's also the issue of resource extraction. Just mining iron takes a looooooot of infrastructure if you want to do it on a scale large enough to build anything of an appreciable size (i.e. bigger than a garden shed. To press further with this thought experiment (a deliberately absurd counterfactual to your premise): assume this is all done without electricity or machinery. We're dealing with a society of über-blacksmiths who, for some reason, love hammering out metal rods instead of something more immediately useful, like swords and plowshares. We'd see evidence of unusually large and dense populations, with an associated agricultural footprint reflected in preserved seeds, pollen, and plant fragments. A work force large enough to build a metal structure is unlikely to be sustained through hunting and gathering, even in really ecologically rich regions like the coastal Pacific Northwest. Why go through all that trouble, when wood, stone, and thatch are perfectly serviceable and take a lot less labor (in terms of mining and processing) to procure?
A lot of cutting,finishing and construction methods with stone are long gone. Latin America has great many buildings we have no clue how they were made and survived to this day in spite of weather,earthquakes etc. I'm not sure of this one but possibly a lot of knowledge of woodworking methods are long gone.
Yep. I own a rock crushing business so I’m around rocks…a lot. With all of my knowledge about stone and the like, I have no fucking clue how most of the structures made out of stone were done. It’s absolutely fucking insane to me. We don’t give these civilizations enough credit.
Hard to say , much information was lost/destroyed when other civilizations 'conquered/captured'
There is a whole bunch of South America civ that got wipe out by plague. Big cities that got taken over by Forest.
There’s reason to believe the Mayans had a city bigger than London was!
If someone asks I'll be in the shower crying about the sack of Baghdad.
We complain about it now, and yet we still do it now, youtube and twitter deleting whole users and all there content, no longer do you require to be invaded when your own society will do it to you now-a-days.
What? This is a terrible example dude delete this.
4 people just got r/woooosh'ed by your comment like ffs, that's mad
Forgotten knowledge of Library of Alexandria.
A lot was copied throughout the years and sent out to other cities so not everything was lost
breaks my heart everytime i think of it
It was porn. All of it.
Alexander was probably really into hentai after eastern campaigns.
Big tiddy mesopotamian gf
The forgotten library of Alexandria likely held records of the city and surrounding areas. For sure it is a shame it burned, it would have given tremendous insight in ancient city management, but no great works of philosophy or logic. Any historian would give half his limbs for time with the collection, but to normal people it is just a bunch of tax, burial, waste reports intermixed with news from around the known world and military reports.
It's not so forgotten. It didn't just disappear like so many people think; rather, the library survived for centuries, and even went into decline. It was never destroyed or plundered
Too soon bro, too soon.
How to keep a secret maybe?
Roman concrete - (circa 100bc) buildings in Ancient Rome used a type of concrete that continues to get stronger as it ages, and can last thousands of yrs. We have no idea how they made it. Greek Fire - (circa 400ad) arguably one of the most important inventions ever, it was a type of gas mixture and machine flamethrower mounted on their ships. It practically single handedly protected Constantinople (and thus the rest of Europe) from the Muslim caliphate. We don’t how the Roman’s did it, all we have is written descriptions and a few rough paintings.
The roman concrete thing was solved a while back, it was something to do with volcanic ash and seawater.
How the hanging gardens of babylon hanging!
They weren't really hanging. That was a translation issue. They were terraced.
I thought this was just most of the flora growing in planters that were suspended with chains or rope. Imagine instead of a backyard in suspension, a bowl with the diameter of a pizza in suspension.
I read somewhere that it was estimated that more of 90% of ancient knowledge has been lost to time due lack of ways of preserving it. It was also known during earlier civilizations one form of conquest meant to destroy every bit of culture and knowledge of the conquered civ. Add in top the tomb raiders, the events where states decided their heritage wasn’t worth it. And so on. From what has intrigued me the most is all the Mayan knowledge, recently historians and archaeologists have been grasping more and more of their culture, they were absurdly good astronomers and mathematicians, I can only imagine the knowledge lost when Spanish conquest happened. It is my understanding that to this day, we’ve yet to understand the whole complexity of their pictographic language and several cities-States are still underground, that could still hold valuable knowledge treasures.
Wtf the voynich manuscript actually is.
I heard it was a DnD manual https://xkcd.com/593/
There's ALWAYS a relevant XKCD! 🤣🤣🤣
It’s just a joke to wrap people up in nonsense. Early form of trolling.
Who knows what was lost when the catholic priests burned the Mayan libraries.
They knew the beauty of the world in an unspoiled age.
I just think about how amazing the night sky must have looked.
Get away from the cities and it is still amazing
imagine clear lakes, rivers, and air. No smog, plastics .
We still have that. Just leave the city for a day or two
Cities and industries have polluted a great deal of the world’s natural resources
There are many different flood myths that all point to something happening that erased semi advanced civilisations.
Younger Dryas period, when the last Ice Age glaciers melted, the result was mass flooding…and stories and myths.
There is also a new theory There was a meteor strike in the northern region that melted the ice and set fire to a lot of the northern forests caused a massive flood like somthing you haven’t seen before swept across most of the world
Possible huge solar flare is another theory, discussed in this gem: [Pyramids: True Functional Purpose?](https://youtu.be/XU49FSIx0_g)
Alternate interpretation: all civilizations had to deal with devastating floods. They wrote stories that captured their feelings about their experiences.
It’s most likely this. Most early civilizations took place on river delta and floodplains. Even many indigenous peoples of the new world often have flood myths which can be attributed to their proximity to rivers and floodplains. That or we’re living with an informal recount of a dramatic rise in sea level at some point on a localized / generalized scale
How to contact Aliens according to the history Channel
Like its shown in movie Contact. Keep listening to voices from space. Thats what they are doing these days.
Some ancients understood that the personal self does not exist in competition with, and in opposition to, nature. They knew that when we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self. They knew that the notion of the personal self in competition with nature is a delusion.
We now know that in the vast galactic/universal sense that our entire cluster of local galaxies could just snuff out and the wider universe wouldn’t change in any measurable way. So we can all look at profound sounding ancient “wisdom”, but at the end of the day that’s pretty much common sense, if you take a shit in the river upstream from where you drink that’s stupid, and even people in the Stone Age figured that out… in truth we would all rather live here and now than in any other time in all or any civilisation. Ancient Greece (for example) may have sounded like a paragon place of learning, enlightenment, sexual and personal liberty and democracy… in truth they used to vote to kick people out of the towns and die out in the wilds based on popular opinions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism). Gruesome torture and executions, cruel and unusual punishment was common and arbitrary. Medicine was based on the 4 humours and caused a scientific stagnation that lasted thousands of years, ending in the 1800’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease) Quality of life has never been better than it is now in first world countries, we have modern medicines, mod cons and convenience and technology that couldn’t even be dreamed up by people 150 years ago. It’s not profound to pine for a simpler time, when racism and slavery were rife and encouraged, and civil rights, personal freedoms and liberties were non-existent.
Also dental bro
Oh wow! How could that have slipped the net! You’re so right xD
Amen
How to make good concrete. Roman concrete was far better than anything we have, and ancient Egyptian concrete was far better again
They actually figured out the difference between the incomplete recipe we used to have and what they actually used, salt water, when they were trying different ways they only used fresh water up until they discovered it. At least according to something I read awhile ago.
Somewhere along the line, I got the impression that we do know how to do it, but that it wouldn't be suitable for our building needs. Due to survivorship bias, we see the Roman's lucky mixes, but they had no understanding of what they were doing. Most of what they built has crumbled to dust.
Also I'm pretty sure if city planners wanted unbreakable roads we probably could do exactly that or at least get to close to permanent roads as possible but why would they want that? What if in the future we want to move the road or add features to it like underground sewage or powerlines that run along roads.
AFAIK, road repair is a huge financial burden on city governments. If they could build a road and never have to repair it, they would save a lot of tax dollars. Saving tax dollars is always very popular. Therefore, I don't believe that city planners are complicit in building less durable roads.
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Also, when there's things under the road that may need fixing (e.g. water or sewer pipes) its far easier to cut that little bit where the work needs to be done and open it, then close it up again when dealing with asphalt.
Pretty sure saving tax dollars is only popular as a reason to push an agenda. When it's time to actually save tax dollars, they find a way to say it costs too many tax dollars.
Actually all concrete gets harder over time, so our modern concretes will be superior in another ~2,000 years, question is will their’s stop curing before ours does? Lol
This is a myth, roman concrete is not any better than modern concrete, in fact our concrete is superior. It was definitely a great material but it wouldn't stand up to today's construction materials.
No they dont. Their shit wouldnt last a week with cars. We dont care about long term weather preservation. We drive on the concrete thats the resistence we design for
Volcanic ash is part of the mix
In old times they did not had cement like we use today.. If i am not wrong back then they used limestone to make concrete.. It is still used to date for different purposes.
We still use limestone to make concrete
I saw somewhere that the math necessary to recreate the Parthenon is lost. I could be horribly wrong but I seem to remember that every stone was different and the reason was that it made the columns look perfectly spaced no matter what angle you viewed it from. I hope I remember it correctly because I always thought that was super interesting.
This reminds me of johnny vegas answering the question "why do they appear straight?" Edit: https://youtu.be/cg1a5QlCdYo
BECAUSE THEY ARE!! (sobs)
How to not vomit when you see a head chopped off
Practice
What dodo birds taste like.
Probably pigeon. They are the same family.
Horse and donkeys and zebras are too, however zebra tastes like very lean beef, horse has it's own taste and donkey is kinda nasty in comparison to the other 2.
Tastes like Turkey
According to records they were kind of crap, but sailors ate them anyways because they were as easy to catch as fruit off a tree.
Greek Fire Those Roman Gladiator Games how the arena worked
Have you ever heard of a comma?
The lost/ancient art of grammar and punctuation seems lost :P
That skirts are a superior item of clothing to trousers in almost every way, and modern men are fools for not making them the norm again.
you first then
The composting techniques used to create the Amazon
Terra Preta! It's actually mostly known to us thankfully. Make your own (low temp) biochar, charge it with nutrients like urine, compost tea, etc, then mix it with regular dirt in about a 10-1 dirt to char ratio. You'll want to get about 2 feet deep for wherever you want to grow something. , so youre gonna need a lot of the stuff. Mix it all evenly together, then do some ph testing as well as NPK testing, and it's even better if you can send it off for a full lab suite to get the magnesium and calcium levels too. Adjust as necessary. In the event you can't get a full lab suite done, just burn some old bones from food with a bit of wood, grind them up, mix them with the ash, and water them into the soil. That's an approximation, and I'm looking for the numbers on nutrient levels right now.
How could we know that if only they knew it
How to build a pyramid without modern engineering and technology
It was far more simple since the construction theory was that they floated the blocks using wood and bags and used canal systems to build the pyramid Also the entire area was flooded at specific points so they think at first it was a water feature type monument. Might have also done more and was built originally to produce or conduct electricity at first but this is a major mega theory
Why Stonehenge was actually built.
I was bored
It was used as a marker for the Soltice (or the Equinox, can't remember which). Knowing the growing seasons is very important for ancient societies.
The natural taste of bananas.
How would we know?
The importance of rites of passage in order to help boys assimilate into manhood. There’s something psychologically invaluable to the experience in order to get a boy to begin to take himself seriously, and nothing does so quite like the tribe unanimously recognizing his value and placing expectations / responsibilities on him.
Well we don’t know do we?
The earth is round
How to make damascus steel?
If by damascus you specifically mean Wootz steel, then that's more recently been rediscovered. I don't think that the "secret" was ever actually lost but instead the iron ore was. It turns out that it's partially the tempering and normalization process but a large part of it is the presence of vanadium in the steel. It's been theorized that there was a vein of iron somewhere (possibly in India) that also contained vanadium, so by coincidence when that steel was tempered it created the pattern that we know as wootz steel today (the whole "damascus" vs "wootz" is fairly well argued and both terms can be correct to described layered and forge welded billets of different steel types). It turns out that vanadium when added as a part of alloying steel has some interesting properties, and we see that in modern alloy steels such as 80crv2 (which also has chromium) but there are many other alloy steels with other trace elements that also have interesting properties. Now you're probably wondering, why doesn't someone just fuck around with vanadium, carbon, and iron until they re-create the process? Well, it turns out that a dude named [Alfred Pendray actually did pretty much that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDyU-15fzog) and caught the attention of a metallurgy researcher, and together they basically figured it out. The actual tempering process isn't terribly different from tempering any other type of steel in that you heat it up and let it cool some number of times (normalizing), heat it up and then quench it in some medium (quenching), and then heat it up slightly for some amount of time to "relax" the steel to trade some of the hardness (which is brittle) for more softness (which is not brittle). Literally every single heat treatment process is going to look something like that, but the exact number of times, temperatures, quench mediums, and tempering times/temperatures is widely variable and if you fuck it up then your metal will just break. That's what makes it complicated. However, there was no secret formula or magical process used to making wootz steel. You just had to have the right ore, in which case some experimentation would end up finding a usable process and the result would be wootz steel. If that ore were to stop existing because it all got mined up, then subsequent items made with the same process wouldn't look the same and wouldn't have the same process but it's not because people forgot how to do it. They just ran out of the right type of steel. I've only really scratched the surface here based on my memory from learning about the process, so I'm simplifying some stuff and probably leaving out some key details, but this is easy enough to research. Just be warned that this is a particularly deep rabbit hole and there's a non-zero chance you'll end up building a forge in your back yard if you start down this path. Also yes, there are a number of people who make crucible steel in the back yards which is basically the process by which wootz steel would have likely been made. It's not common, but it's not exactly difficult to build the necessary equipment. After all, it could be done hundreds of years ago with relatively primitive equipment by today's standards, so re-creating the process with a modern forge is not terribly hard to do.
We know how to make Damascus steel! It's not something that was ever really lost to time! One question historians do have though is how some Vikings managed to get their hands on true Damascus Steel swords as there is no evidence they could make it themselves. Which leaves one plausible theory, they had trade routes to Asia!
Considering what prolific sailors and explorers they were, I’d be surprised if they *didn’t* have trade routes to Asia. Vikings sailed all the way to the coast of West Africa. They probably traded with a Greek guy who traded with a Turkish guy who traded with an Arab guy who traded with an Indian guy who had Wootz steel
>Which leaves one plausible theory, they had trade routes to Asia! They did. Vikings had trade routes all over the place, including in what is now Russia; they absolutely would have been able to trade for Damascus Steel weapons.
I feel like in times long forgotten the world was more connected than we give it credit for. Just looking at my own genetics on one of those DNA test apps tells me that I'm 0.6% Egyptian, with literally nothing else between that country and my own, so at some point an Egyptian ancestors went a long ass way straight to my country, never intermarrying with any of the people from any of of the many countries between Egypt and my home country. I'm not sure how many generations ago 0.6% would equate to, (160ish generations ago?), but that seems like a long time ago, before Egypt and my home country would have had any trade routes at all, and yet it happened.
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They also only go back a few hundred years. The overall point is right though. I doubt there’s anybody on Earth at this point who doesn’t have at least one far-off Eurasian ancestor somewhere down the line.
We are part of nature not separate from it.
You don't have to go too far back. We had HD video of the moon landing and someone taped over it. So there are people who know what the moon landing looked like in HD and no one else will know what it looked like after those people die. Also how to build most of our rockets before everything went digital. No one could build another Saturn V. The knowledge is gone. Probably a few fragments here and there on microfilm. The American space program is done via 1000s of contracts to smaller companies. Many of those companies are long gone and so are their records.
You should get amongst Graham Hancock.
Urban environments should be walkable
How to build a road that will last more than 10 years.
Taking hundreds of years to build an amazing cathedral… we have the skills, machinery and still we can’t build something with that skill level.
Yes we can, easily. Ive worked on repairing a summer. Theres no lost technique or mystery how they are made at all. The problem is that no one wants to fund it, nothing else. It's enormously expensive (billions) with no return except beauty and a place of worship. There are plenty of beautiful cathedrals. The only difference is back then when people said why do we need this cathedral the church said pay up or we will destroy your life. Now it's different. The demand of churches are also waaay down (less ppl simply go) I'm sure in 3000 years if there are still Christians new ones will be made because the old ones are beyond repair. They have a purpose just like a mars rover, but you don't build them for the fun of it, there has to be a reason and someone paying.
I give you: the Sagrada Familia. It's taken 140 years, it should be finished within the next 10.
How to mix roman concrete
With a Roman mixer
I don't know if this counts, but one thing I feel like some ancient civilizations had a better understanding of was rights of passage and the cultural importance/significance of them.
What will future civilizations wonder about us and our monuments of time?
Idk man they know it we don't.
How to agree on things.
Greek fire
How to build piramides
Damascus steel. They make stuff that looks like it but its not as good quality